Look over there!

Since I'm about halfway through with my revisions, I'm spending today reading through and editing the first half of the book. This helps when it comes to moving on to the second half - looking back at where I've been gives me a better idea of where I'm going. I've made great progress and feel a lot more positive about the whole thing, because I LIKE the first half. That is a good position from which to revise the second. How did your writing day go? Hope it was a good one!

So I just stopped by to point you towards a great pro-Nanowrimo article by the fiendishly awesome John Scalzi. For some reason there has a bit of a Nano-backlash on the interwebs recently, which I find a little puzzling. Sure, it doesn't work for everyone, but it works brilliantly for many, many people. It's good practice. It's a fun way to meet like-minded people. It forces you to set a goal and meet it in daily increments. None of these things are negative, in my opinion. And if it doesn't appeal to you, or it doesn't help you, then don't do it.

"Is it going to work for everyone? No. Is it going to be useful for everyone? No. But it’s going to be useful for some, and that’s fine – the ones it’s not useful for will find some other way to climb that mountain. Meanwhile the skills that those it works for learn — write every day, keep writing, get that story done – are skills that are transferable outside of the NaNoWriMo context and will be a benefit when that new writer, having completed the task of writing 50,000 words in one month, decides to try to write 100,000. In April. Or whenever. Yes, there may be some people who fetishize NaNoWriMo or take less than useful lessons from it (“Novels must be 50,000 words! They must only be written in November!”), but let’s entertain the notion that this will be more about those particular people than it is about NaNoWriMo." - John Scalzi

And another more colourful but no less pithy quote from the same article:

“Dude, a program that encourages thousands of people annually to celebrate the act of creating words — of creating their own words — and you want to piss all over that? If you look to the right, I have some kittens you can set on fire while you’re at it.” - John Scalzi

Hear, hear!