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Sunday, November 18, 2012

Novel for November

I'm almost done with the first rough (really rough) draft of the next novel, the one I'm doing for NaNoWriMo this month. At least with the fifty thousand words I need to finish the contest. This book will be longer before the month is up, at least seventy thousand words. After that, I start filling in some of the missing pieces, blank spots where I wasn't sure to take the story in this chapter or that one.
After that, it gets less fun. Editing, proofing, spell check. Yeah, spell check should be first you say? I run spell check every time I am ready to save and fix it then and there. The last run is for all the corrections I make due to editing and proofreading.
Sometimes proofreading fixes things that weren't broke. I try to make my characters speak differently from one another. Dialects help do this as does bad grammar and poor use of spelling.
If I have a person from a tiny rural village, he will not sound like the educated and cultured Prince who is in need of a lackey, e.g., the villager. The villager will say something like "We don't need no stuff lak dat, yer durn tooten we don't."
With that sentence, my spell check has highlighted half the sentence.
If I use Word rather than open office, it gets even worse. I have office seven on my other computer and it checks grammar, sentence structure, asks if you have clean socks, everything. It gets overloaded when I use dialects so I have to turn some features off. If I have to turn them off, what's the point of having them, right? (It might get overloaded because my machine in the living room is old and wimpy. Just a thought.)
So I use my open office and finish off the story. The we edit it. Then I run it through the Word program. If I take care of the big stuff, it doesn't get overloaded, not as bad at least. Since I use Smashwords to distribute my books, I have to use Word to fit their requirements anyway.
I prefer my laptop with Linux to the one in the living room, but there are sometimes I still need to use windows. So I keep it for the word processor and the numerous checks it offers.

I baked again yesterday. Pumpkin muffins, pumpkin loaf and another loaf of Banana bread. The muffins recipe I got from here:

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/pumpkin-muffins-ii/detail.aspx?event8=1&prop24=SR_Title&e11=pumpkin%20muffin%20ii%20recipe&e8=Quick%20Search&event10=1&e7=Home%20Page

Yeah, it's long. Cut and paste like I do, or go to allrecipes and look for pumpkin muffins II. Nice collection of other holiday favorites there as well.




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