Jumbled Words

I attribute at least half my word count to the sudden appearance of people that I had no idea existed three days ago. Say hello to Catriona, who hides a lot, and Angus who is a royal pain in the arse. They’re certainly making life interesting, I have to say.

Enough about NaNo, let’s speak about… writing. Er. Yes. That is possibly also NaNo-related. Sorry about that.

I’ve been enjoying reading all the writing tips from various published writers. Scott Westerfeld is the one who is writing the most useful ones, as far as I’m concerned. And some day I will actually read one of his books. Seriously. I will. I especially like his post on meta docs, which TansyRR elaborated on here. I’m not entirely sure that my meta docs are as interesting, since I have yet to get something published, but I figured that I needed to write something about ZuluPad, which is, seriously, the best thing ever, and I don’t know what I did before I found out about it.

Anyone who knows me also knows that I am a total slut for writing software. I was extremely sad when I realised that Scrivener is nothing but a wet dream for me, as I don’t own a Mac and is unlikely to be able to afford it in the next decade or, you know, fourteen. I’ve tried a few others since, and I think the one I like the best is Rough Draft. yWriter is excellent too, if you are the sort of writer who writes lots of small scenes and puzzle them together into a book. I’m not, everything that happens do so because of what happened before, and I am too much of a control freak to use the square brackets that Justine Larbalestier writes about here. I’d much rather write a very rough outline of each scene as I go along, and go back and add more later. This constant ret-conning means that it’s not really a good idea for me to split it up, like I did when I used yWriter.

But Rough Draft! Oh. It’s lovely. It’s actually just a tweak of a .rtf-based word processor, but it does employ lists, which I love. Any old word processors have a search and replace function, right? But Rough Draft lists them for you, so you can see for yourself just how often you use a word. Or, which I do far more often, do a search when you need to scroll back for the deatails on somebody’s hair or injury or, you know, what exactly that dirty old curry place was called again.

I made a screen cap for your pleasure, where you can see that I have used the word “because” 128 times in 20,000 words. It also has a “prose mode”, which automatically puts a tab in for you at the start of each sentence, it has very handy “insert” and “notes” function on the side, and my favourite thing about it — it lets you put tabs of several docs side by side. Which is useful if you, like me, write as much for your leftovers doc, which is bits and pieces to use later, as you do in the main doc. The only thing I don’t like about it is that it does not use pages. That is, it all looks like one loooooong piece of texts. No new pages for new chapters. It’s kind of annoying, but I can live with it.

And for a post in which I meant to write about the awesome that is ZuluPad, I have written a lot without mentioning, don’t you think? You can download it here, if you want. But for you to want it I need to talk about it, don’t I?

Basically, it’s like your own little Wikipedia. You can put in whatever you like, highlight a word and then click “link”, and a separate page will be created. And there you can type in OTHER STUFF, and maybe something in there requires a link. And so on.

Because I like to have things sorted in a very certain manner my main page looks like this. It’s a bit redundant, since you can find each of these links in the drop down menu, but this way I can sort them by topic rather than alphabetically, which makes me feel like I know what I’m doing. Most of the time.

Of course, since this is straight up YA, and not fantasy or any type of alternate universe (even if the place-called-Kirk doesn’t exist in the real world), this list is kind of short. Because I’m not making up terms, crazy abilities and other fun stuff.

And just to show you how it looks when I click on one of the links, I also made a cap of this. Here’s the names of everyone in the book, or rather, the ones that fit in this little screen cap. I sadly had to leave out the old woman that is identified as “is a total gossip, but she always gives us money for Christmas, so I’ve always liked her okay”.

This is mostly so I don’t use the same name twice (it has happened!), and also, so I don’t OD on names starting with Mc. Which I kind of have already, haven’t I? I blame it on the original story taking place in Scotland, but I realised that if I know very little about British culture, I know even less about Scottish. So I changed location.

And yes, I do have a page titled “things to ask Jenn/Val”, because they are my resident Brit and Scot, respectively. Everyone needs at least one of each. I also have a couple of Aussies and Americans. What can I say? I’m a lucky girl.

…

And, in case you were wondering, yes, these mood swings are just as exhausting to me as they are to you. Yesterday was awful, awful no good day, and today? Today is pretty awesome. Though I think I’m about to crash in a heap. Yesterday I tried not to nap, which is what normally makes my day manageable, just so I would sleep at night, totally forgetting the essential thing. Namely, just because I don’t sleep during the day doesn’t mean I do sleep at night. Even if I take insane amounts of antidepressants that are SUPPOSED to knock me out. They don’t. Not anymore. But damn, I wrote a good chapter of book in my head while I was tossing and turning.

Maybe tomorrow I will write about the importance of having a good playlist when you are writing. And what’s in it. All that.