Plot Crystals

I found an interesting website on plotting a novel. The process is called "The Snowflake Method", created by Randy Ingermanson. He proposed a "crystallization" process, in which the author begins with a one-sentence summary and builds upward from there. I really like the systematic nature of the approach. I don't think I have time to use the process for NaNoWriMo this year (which starts in exactly 24 hours... it being 12:00 AM the morning of October 31 at this moment), but I think it could be a valuable tool for rewriting my first novel, which has had me stymied since the spring of 2006.

It's interesting to note that Ingermanson is a Christian physicist who writes Biblically-inspired science fiction. That's an extremely small pond. Mind you, he is no longer a practicing superstring theorist, but he's still a scientist with a Ph.D. from Berkeley. It's been my experience that very very few physicists are able to bridge the cognitive distance between the Biblical and the scientific. For me nineteen years of religious education unraveled after only ten weeks of college education.

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I have added the ability to subscribe to this blog via RSS. The URL you will want to use is here. The next task is learning how to "fold" my blog entries, so that only an excerpt appears on the front page. That requires mucking about inside the HTML.

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Today's writing totals:
Journal:528 words
Blog: 236 words
DAILY TOTAL: 764 words

OCTOBER RUNNING TOTAL: 14,167 words