I’ll blame the turkey yesterday for posting my links later than usual. It can’t have anything to do with staying up late to keep up with my NaNo, can it? I’m running just over 41k right now, and headed into the aftermath. Trouble is my main characters have yet to meet. It’s okay, I think. They’ve been interacting and affecting each other all along, but I want to reveal Sam for real before the book ends, and that will take a little bit of dancing about.
Fun
A wonderful stop-motion video using pencils, colored or otherwise to illustrate the lyrics:
http://vimeo.com/31939621
Publishing
A close look at the value of a good copyeditor and how it works:
http://www.magicalwords.net/david-b-coe/on-publishing-and-self-publishing-the-value-of-professional-copyediting/
Research
A look at handedness in humans, this fascinates me because I’m a right-dominant ambidextrous person while one of my sons was a lefty and self-converted (so is more accurately a left-dominant ambi. The one question they don’t explore, and the one that is the most interesting to me, is social pressure to be a righty beyond the stigma against left-handedness:
http://www.livescience.com/17009-left-handedness-ambidexterity.html
Science
Dental Dinosaur Detectives discover evidence of the postulated sauropod great migrations:
http://www.livescience.com/16737-dinosaurs-migration-seasonal.html
Writing
A wonderful reminder of the essence of writing a good story without all the distracting details of writing advice:
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/013243.html#013243
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hmmm. The thing about the style sheet (in the MW post about copy-editing) sounds useful! I’ve been doing it as comments – asking which of two spellings of a person’s name is correct and so on; putting it as a separate sheet sounds useful and no harder than the redlined comments. Though I’d comment/redline as well, to mark “here’s a problem”.
You must have missed my earlier post on custom dictionaries as well. A good way to keep track of similar spellings that are not the same: http://margaretmcgaffeyfisk.com/custom-dictionaries-why-and-how-to/
But yes, I keep a spreadsheet that lists the publisher’s style conventions along with any questions I had so I can track whether I’ve received an answer and which it is. Very useful across multiple books too.