Getting ready for November

We're mid-way through the month of October. And, as you can tell, I managed to recover my MacBook. I'm not entirely convinced about the new version of Mac OS - Lion. But, it's up and running now so I no longer care.

There was a time I would, but now I simply need computers to, what's the phrase?, "just work".

Halfway through October means only about 15 days to the start of November and the madness that is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).

I'll be working again with pen and paper, so the lack of a functioning MacBook would not have been a huge problem. I am really hoping not to do what I did last year - have to sprint madly at the end. In truth, 1,667 words per day is not a lot - given I managed over 11,000 on the last day of November last year!

So, the intent is to go the steady route. Let's see how that works out.

During NaNoWriMo 2009, I wrote the first book of a two-parter (although there's a third percolating at the back of my mind - but, for the moment, it can stay there.) This year I'm going to write the second part, picking up a few months after the last scene of the first.

I have some ideas about the plot. Some of the characters, those who made it through the first, return. There are some new ones.

Right now I'm working out the plot trajectory/points. I am not an outline kinda guy but I am going to "block out" some of the main areas of the story as the narrative will unfold from (a minimum of) three different points of view - as the first story did.

I'm using, as I did for NaNoWriMo last year, an application named Index Card for the iPad. In addition to its corkboard metaphor, it can turn the cards into an outline.

The outline can be imported into Scrivener, giving me some structure on which to hang the text.

For the moment, I've just drawn the lightest of character sketches, color-coded according to the narrative's point of view character. When I lay out the different scenes, I'll maintain the color coding. The theory being I should be able to tell at a glance how balanced the story is.

I'll let you know.

To all those embarking on NaNoWriMo this year - good luck, and keep writing.

What to do with all these Haiku?

Those who have seen my tweets passing by in the timeline (what an odd construction that is...) or as part of the "news" page on facebook, or yet again, off to the right on this blog will have detected my fondness for the simple, though not easy, form of poetry known as Haiku.

How I love a sentence that runs pell-mell all over a page!

According to my Twitter page I've sent over 1,900 tweets. The vast majority of these will have been the short seventeen-syllable scraps of thought in poetic form. With enough practice you can get competent at anything. So, some of the haiku I've composed are good, arresting even. Some, by the same token, are pretty bad - but then, I'm recovering from a lifetime of perfectionist tendencies (not, I assure you, of perfection).

What to do with all these Haiku, I ask? Well, nothing actually. Nothing, at least with the vast majority of them. I quite like the fact that most of them are ephemeral. Less so than I thought as it turns out. I was quite surprised to discover how far back I could go along my Twitter timeline.

No matter, once composed and dropped into the timeline, I consider them off on their own. (Write if you get work, y'hear?)

However (there's always a "however", isn't there?), I've sometimes included a photograph I'd taken with a tweet, combining an image with the verse. These, of necessity, had to be hosted on some web site for viewing. And so they remained.

It was suggested that I might assemble them into an electronic book form. It's possible others might enjoy viewing and reading a collection of these #PhotoHaiku, as I called them within Twitter.

I imagined I might have sixteen or twenty to pull together. So it might make something interesting to view. I was wrong, I assembled over sixty of these photo and poetry combinations, grouping them into three sections:

• Light and Darkness
• Travel
• Seasons

I wondered how I was going to do it, and found that Scrivener, the tool I use on the Mac for my writing, has all the capabilities I needed to handle both the images and the text, in addition to generating native Kindle and Nook formats. The ePub format it generates also works for Apple's iBook - but Apple requires an ISBN - and I didn't have $125 handy.

And so, Haiku - Through a Lens was born. I'm currently thinking through how best to launch it, but the act of pulling together the images and text, grouping them in some coherent way and generating the final output was invigorating.

I must do this again.