Novel-in-a-Day 3: With a Vengeance

I for one love the UK dialects, Manchester being my fave. Having read Agatha Christie from a very young age, I also have acquired just a few “linguistic” practices when I write. I’m forever taking the u out of things ending in or. I think the dialectual (sp?) differences in English in general are fascinating, and thus, wouldn’t change those elements in our “babies” from this and the past two years.

I have some ideas. I believe PF has joked every year about its being his last year with NIAD. How about a divvying up of the tasks? Like, one, have a person make the reminder contact a few months prior to previous folks to see if they’ll show and keep the list of participants updated and then the follow up correspondence. Have someone else send out the schnitzel with the info. Dropbox makes it so all PF has to do is up load it. He or his helper can create a folder for each participant and then give them access to their own folder. A third person can so something else. I don’t know how you might break things down PF, but if you delegate some of the tasks that would free up your time needed to create the master plan, then perhaps it won’t be so daunting a prospect each year. Once all is said and done someone can do the compiling/formating and after running it by you get it all posted. I’m I too far afield?

I’m on chapter 3 and hope to delve back into it tonight. I even posted a link at work for folks to download if they wanted, then worried that the content I’ve not read might violate someone’s sense of propriety or something. Oh, well. I like not knowing how the book will go. Hopefully that won’t change.

The term that stood out for me – and it was used consistently throughout the novel whenever we were at someone’s house (or safehouse as the case may be) – was ‘lounge’. Every house had a lounge – a room quite unheard of in these parts. I am pretty sure those chapters were written by people far and wide, so I am suspecting a common cause – floor plans in some people’s packets perhaps?

gr

No floor plans that I saw… maybe we all just have lounges?

As an Australian, perfectly unremarkable to me, to the point that I assumed it was entirely non-regional and absolutely common everywhere.

It’s not like it is a “sitting room”, which no one outside of pre-1900s Britain has ever had!

Interesting, as I would read these two statements as meaning different things in UK English. If you are “in hospital”, then you have been admitted to hospital as a patient. If you are “in the hospital”, this is simply a statement of location (similar to “in the cinema” or “in the garden”), so it could apply equally to visitors, staff or delivery men as well as to people receiving medical treatment.

I had assumed that there was only one hospital in the entire United States.

Anyone interested in the Scrivener Project file used in the preparation and compilation of this year’s NiaD should head on over to: pigfender.com/index.php/2013 … -in-a-day/

Ioa, could you add a link to this page to the opening post? Also, would you mind replacing the download links you put on the opening post to the page link: pigfender.com/index.php/2013 … niad-2013/
You’re giving me all of the bandwidth for the downloads but none of the pageviews!

Am I missing something? Everything seems to be blank. Would it be different for the windows version? I have all the cork board stuff with nothing on the cards.

The plot synopsis and briefs are in the snapshots. The corkboard synopsis should just say the authors name as I use that text in the compile.

Actual chapter text is in the documents underneath the chapter folders.

And that’s how I knew I was dealing with a higher class of people. Man, I gotta get me a lounge!

gr

p.s. BTW, the floor plan theory panned out. Two residences have floor plans in the Scriv project file – each features a lounge (aka living room).

Nope, everything is still blank.

A Bit Later: Never mind. I’ve got it all sorted.

My suggestion for next year’s genre: ChicLit. Guffaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaw

Here in the States we mostly have living rooms. Sometimes we also have family rooms or tv rooms or rec rooms or rumpus rooms, but those tend to be rooms beyond the living room, where you can send the kids when they’re too sticky or obnoxious to be tolerated in the living room.

We also have the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in place of the Hauliers Union.

I’m not criticizing, though. I’m not even criticising. I rather enjoyed the alternate Vegas we created together. :slight_smile:

I had a big long reply, but then I lost it to the sql err. BAH!

I’m sorry I seemed to pick on one chapter. There were many things that would pull a “native” American english speaker out of the story. It makes sense since writers didn’t time to research the setting…

Even with those things the individual short stories (aka chapters) are very good. It is a fun read if you understand the point of the NIAD and don’t get hung up on the disconnects and minor issues.

Then that would make you a NaNo Rebel. The rules don’t apply to you, do they mister big-shot? :stuck_out_tongue:

Seriously, there’s no penalty to being a rebel, other than a few odd looks. They even have an official forum for you: nanowrimo.org/forums/nano-rebels, the top (sticky) post is titled: “Welcome to Rebellion! You are NOT a cheater.”

Terrific! Thanks!

s’pose it’s a step up from being a Scrivener miscreant and ne’r-do-'ell! :confused:
Vic

“You talking to me???” :laughing:

In that case you forgot to say:

Yo-momma so rebel that she signs up for NaNoWriMo and only writes “clean your room, do your homework and get out of bed already” 50.000 times. 8)

I’m up to chapter 8 I believe. It’s amazing they way Pigfender crafted it this time allowing for continuity while making room for creativity. Any snafu’s yet or conflicts?

Hmmm, can’t believe we’re still on page 30 here. Well, chillaxin’ is in order here.

Regards,
Montrée

Well, I’ve caught up on sleep as well as my household chores, and finally managed to sit down and read the book we wrote. I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who took part. It’s amazing how much I was surprised by what people come up with to meet the briefs.

I’ve had a flick through the thread again, and picked out a few of the unanswered questions (Stacey, I know you said you were going to ping a couple of questions over. Happy to answer here, or via email if you prefer).

Musical.

I can do this if people want, either on a no-names “by NiaD 2013” basis, or by listing all 25 authors individually.

I don’t have access to the download stats (or at least, I have no idea how to view them), but I do know that the page hosting has had about 600 views, about 85% of which only visited the page once.

Not as much as you might think. I did very little prior to Ioa’s initial announcement (except for coming up with a two paragraph outline), and if you look at the timestamps for the “Rough Synopsis” and “Chapter brief” for each section in the .scriv file, you’ll see that an awful lot of the prep happened very shortly before the event. Anything more than that can seem a little disingenuous, as I explained here all the way back in February.

Anyway, thanks again to all. I can’t say that every minute pulling together our little trio of books has been fun, but I’m certainly proud of the end results, and hope you all are too.

It deserves to be 60,000 downloads.

I only meant that the hours mount up. If each writer spends just 4 hours writing their chapter, that’s 100 hours…over 4 days. I expect they spend longer. 8 hours each? 8+ days? The novel is completed in a single day, but entails x days of actual work. Think it is ingenious and remarkable.

500 authorial hours + 4 compositing hours in 24 hours. Plus Pf’s prep time.

Well, there’s a simpler maths equation here… 25 people x 1 day = 25 peopledays. So we produced our 50,000 word opus (actually just over 54,000) in less time than it takes to write a NaNoWriMo novel. I’d like to think we did it with more focus on quality and content as well!

How do you run a marathon distance at a sprint pace? Make it a relay.