1 in 15333 - The lightning talk I did not deliver

On December 7, I had my first taste of Lightning talks at foss.in. They are a wonderful thing. Unfortunately I did not sign up. Unfortunate because I did not decide to sign up when opportunity knocked and was repenting for not having done so all the way back to my home that evening. I could not make it today - there was another round of lightning talks. The now legendary Danese Cooper was facilitating these talks. She was actually noting down the inital list of speakers from the white board before the event when I went to take a closer look. She even asked me if I was planning to do one. I said I was not sure but would surely attend the session - after grabbing a cup of coffee.
Anyways here is the talk I would have delivered had I signed up that day.



This November about one hundred thousand people signed up for a race. 15,333 people emerged as winners at the end. I was one of them. I was a winner ! I did not know how many people actually won when I finished the race. I came to know about the 15,333 number only a couple of days back. So what kind of race was this, you may be wondering ? It was a writing race. A race against time. A race where one had to write 50,000 words in the 30 days of November. If you do the math, it works out to 1667 words per day. The race was called NaNoWriMo - the National Novel Writing Month.
1667 words per day - that's easy, some of you would say. That's what I also thought initially -
not just from the daily word count perspective but overall I thought I could spit out 50,000 words. No sweat.

I actually signed up a day late, November 2nd, after reading an internal blog where I first came across NaNoWriMo. I did not write anything that day. And on November 3rd I wrote 452 words. I was'nt make much progress as you can make out. By 10th I had serious thoughts of throwing in the towel. But thanks to a combination of pep talks from the NaNoWriMo community, constant encouragement from my buddy and dogged determination on my part in refusing to quit this crazy race, I kept chugging along. A weekend of absolutely no writing was followed by a 5K words Monday and by the 25th I was close to 35K. There was no looking back after that. I finally completed 50K at around 2:00pm on November 30th - ten hours before the deadline ! And probably I was the only one who used vi on Win XP to write the novel !

As I look back it was as I had lived my whole life in that one month. A six month old son at home, Diwali, Barcamp and quality audit at the work place nothwithstanding I actually completed my novel ! Noone has read the novel. Even I have'nt read it. But it does'nt matter.


I encourage all of you to participate in NaNoWriMo 2008 - at least those of you who are 'One Day Novelists', who want to write a novel one day. NaNoWrimo would mark the end of the 'One Day Novelist'.

I may not have spoken exactly these words and managed to complete my talk in the alloted 3 minutes. Nonetheless this is how the talk would have sounded like.