Write on

It's that time of the year again. NaNoWriMo time. Frentic typing, twiddling fingers, scratching heads - all of that and much more. As the badge on the left shows, I am doing it this year as well. Spurred on by last year's 'victory' I guess.

A bigger challenge this year - considering that the first week I have a technical work-out at my company. The week-end after is a team outing for a couple of days and the month end there is a week long conference that I want to attend.

As a prize for last year's winners, nanowrimo organizers have negotiated a deal with CreateSpace. There is an offer to get a free proof-read copy of your novel in paperback form from CreateSpace. Valid for six months from now. Tempting as it is, it would take quite some effort to polish last year's 'work' to a publishable form. Maybe I will take a stab starting December.

For now, it is my new novel that gets priority :-)

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.

A matter of life and death

As you can make out from the nanowrimo badge in the frame, I managed to complete 50K words and was declared a winner ! Yohoo !
I did it with about ten hours to spare - churned out the last four thousand words in about two and half hours. When I started off I was worried about reaching 50K and hence sent my MC on a long tour aroundIndia. Finally when I hit 50K I was no where near completing the story ! So right now the novel is incomplete - hoping I can spend some time over the December 'break' and clean (and complete) the novel. The whole experience was amazing. During the first couple of weeks there were these two voices inside of me - one telling me that all this was a complete waste of time and just stop it. The other voice kept egging me on - now that you have signed up you better complete it. Somewhere after I crossed 25K these voices kind of merged and I could hear - you should have stopped much earlier; now that you have reached this far better give your best shot and go all the way !
There was a point when I thought I would cry when I was done - one of those tiring days I guess. I thought two consecutive 3K word days were awesome and then I did an exhilirating 5K word day - on a working day ! That was it - I had to complete this thing I started.
And I did it ! Yohoo !!

Anyways, on Friday I wanted to have a small TGIO celebration at home. Raghu's first wedding anniversary also coincided on the same day. So on the way back from work to home, I dropped in at a Nilgiris store. There is a new chain of stores around the city - got to know that the management has changed and they are driving the expansion.
The black forest looked inviting - there were only three of them which I picked up immediately. As I looked around the display window, I came across a card stating "Life By Choclate". My mind immediately made a connection to "Death By Choclate" - a richly sweet cake with couple of scoops ice cream that is available at Corner House. Was this choice of name deliberately aimed the Corner House offering ?

Some people live by choclate and some are willing to die for it.

Being a more positive name, I picked one of the LBC's and one double choclate moouse. I strongly recommend the double choclate moouse - do try it out. I really liked it

The first 10K !

Finally, I managed to reach the first personal milestone - my nanostats bar graph touched the 10K line! Yohooo !!


This is turning out to be a bigger challenge than I initially thought. There have been momemnts of self-doubt. Even times when I thought of throwing in the towel.
But I have somehow managed to reach 10K !!

So another Yohooo !!
As 15th November is nearing, I should have been closer to 25K than 10K. Need a good couple of real good days of write-a-thons to make up now.

Its all uphill from here :-)

Me too !

Read about NaNoWriMo in an internal blog post and signed up on an impulse. So what's the deal ? You attempt to write 50,000 words or more in the 30 days of November - that's all. As the web site conveys, the preference given to 'quantity over quality' is a refreshing change from some of the other endeavours that one pursues and the expectations out of them.

Starting a day late, I now need to type like crazy. The preparations of the upcoming quality audits, festivals (Diwali, arguably the biggest festival of India) and 6 month old kid at home do not help the cause.

Let me make it clear - I am not complaining about the last 2 points. Diwali brings a few holidays along with it which should mean more time to type :) And Vidush's smile can launch a more than a thousand novels !

Anyways, now that I have joined the madness I better figure out a method to it !!
Or should I even bother about the method ?