Preptober 2020

 In my last post, I detailed my first attempt (and win!) at NaNoWriMo 2019. I’m gearing up for participation again this year, but it’s 2020, so everything is different.

I’ll start with the bad news. One of the most enjoyable things about NaNo was the group participation. Meeting up at libraries and cafes to write sitting next to people cheering each other on was a mood boost for sure. We’re all in lockdown, more or less, so virtual write-ins might happen. I spend all day on video conferences for work, so am not excited to spend more time on them even in the pursuit of fun.

Positive changes for 2020 are based around the fact that I’m a much better writer than I was last year! The process of editing last year’s project with critique partners and beta readers opened my eyes to how much I had to learn, and I’m now much improved. I’ve also figured out how to write productively on a keyboard, so won’t have to hand-draft my project this year.

Tools that have helped me are:

  • Scrivener - I got a discount code with last year’s NaNo win. The lack of temptation to switch to another browser tab is one of the real value adds. If I’m not in a browser, I can focus on writing not distraction, hooray!
  • Hemingwayapp.com. This tool highlights complicated sentences, adverbs, and passive voice. It’s great for focusing attention on certain aspects that may warrant a second look.
  • Accessibility tooling to read text aloud. Hearing the text, even in a stilted robot voice, brings up issues with flow/voice that aren’t obvious when reading to myself, and again forces me to focus.

There is a common theme with all of the above, and that is anything that helps me focus in different ways helps a ton. Drafting is probably my favorite part of writing, but even that gets hard sometimes and Twitter is so much easier. Editing is a challenge for me, so finding new ways to look at the text and find issues makes a daunting process manageable.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Just what my TBR stack needs...

 I visited the Bay Area Book Festival on Sunday, attending two sessions devoted to speculative literature. The earlier session, " Cataclysm or Cure-all: Novelists Engage with the Promises and Perils of Our Tech Future ," featured four writers whose work straddles the line between literary and speculative fiction. Vauhini Vara is a tech reporter for the Wall Street Journal, but in parallel has worked on her debut novel, The Immortal King Rao , for thirteen years. It's about a Dalit CEO in a dystopian state where citizens are shareholders. She also co-wrote an essay with GPT-3 on grief. Claire Stanford has somewhat of an outsider's perspective on the tech world, and her novel, Happy For You , explores why so many talented people expend their efforts in the tech industry. Her main character is a philosopher-in-residence at a tech company, creating a quantification-of-happiness app called "Joyful." Kate Folk published a short story collection, Out There , f
Read more

Reading Guilty Pleasures

My reading taste tends toward literary most of the time, and I gravitate towards difficult reads. I like a challenge and learning new words. I like there to be a deeper layer of meaning beneath the words on the page, and experience a thrill of discovery about the unreliability of a narrator. I love connecting various unrelated threads together in a way that's not explicitly spelled out by the author. Vagueness, ambiguity, and conflicting points of view are my jam. But right now, friends, I am exhausted. September/October 2020 has hit like so much of the rest of the year--unrelenting in its awfulness while at the same time passing miserably as more of the same. Every day requires a new evaluation of statistical tradeoffs, the type of thing that human brains excel at. I'm a manager, which means supporting my reports' existential dread while managing my own simultaneously. A Republican congress has defied the dying wish of a feminist icon and Supreme Court justice by shoving t
Read more

A Call for Milquetoastification

Image
There's a sentence in System Error  that contained so many disparate elements, I needed to unpack it: We must confront the algorithmic sorting of users into filter bubbles that contribute to growing polarization, extremism, and decreasing social trust, all of which threaten the health of democracy. This is stated baldly, and with no explanation, so I'd like to examine two questions: First, are these things related in a self-evident way? and second, what are the causal chains at play? Photo by  Alexander Dummer  from  Pexels First, let's consider filter bubbles. Is this a concept that the general public understands well? Perhaps, but let me explain it just to be clear. In the early days of mass media, there was no way to individualize news and entertainment content to tailor it to the individual interests and world views of each consumer. Outlets had their own ideological bent, but given the limitations of the platforms and market pressure to be as broadly applicable as poss
Read more