These tools are actually pretty new to me. I finally cracked and bought a Kindle just after Christmas, mostly for reading on the bus to and from the COBOL factory every day. I'd been lugging around 900-odd pages of China Mieville and it was just getting ridiculous. Now I have something that slips into the front pocket of my bag, doubles as a useful place to store my bus ticket, and lets me read classic French literature for free.
It's also proving a handy way of reading my novel draft without ending up tweaking it. If I read it on my laptop I'll want to make little amendments here and there, instead of reading it through and getting a feel for the story as a whole. I'll also have to waste ten minutes of my lunch break booting up and shutting down, but that's by the by.
Instead of tweaking, I'm going all old-fashioned and making pen-and-paper notes of things that strike me as I go through it. I'm looking at big picture stuff at the moment: plot, pacing and characters. The fiddly little things will come (much) later. The notebook pictured was a Christmas present from a fellow writery-type. When I unwrapped it, she commented that it was practically compulsory for writery-types to buy each other notebooks for Christmas and birthdays. I agreed heartily, not least because she was just in the process of unwrapping the notebook I'd bought for her...
The pen also has writerly credentials. It was a gift to mark the completion of five full years as a Municipal Liaison for NaNoWriMo, and is engraved with my username from the website (I could have had it engraved with my real name, but I've been 'Magenta' in various corners of the internet for so long now that I'm actually more likely to answer to that than the name on my birth certificate). It seems like an appropriate pen to be making notes on a NaNo novel, plus it's not a pen that anyone else in the house can wander off with (always a danger around here).
The notes in the picture are some of the ones I made today, my first day of editing. Reading through it, I was surprised by how quickly the first part went. What I read today took the best part of a week to write, and at the time I was itching to get further on into the more exciting parts of the story. It felt like it was dragging and would be terribly dull to read. In fact, it seems to whizz through and there's definitely room for expansion. I always knew I was going to need to put more work into establishing the characters, and it's heartening to see that I can do that without dragging the story down too much. I'm quite excited to get going now, but first I have to finish the rest of the read-through.
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