It’s a Windows bug, not user error. Empty lines are getting stripped. Overall, you’ll get a much nicer ebook compile using the Mac version right now, so I think you should just take Keith up on his offer. Sorry about that!
Thanks to everyone - this turned out to be a lot of fun. I just read the book, and it had me all the way through. I think everybody did a great job…
I especially appreciate all the work Pigfender put in and the story from Tim.
Brian
I really enjoyed reading The Dark. More than reading the book I enjoyed the experience. I like our little book, the many faces of Jane Scott were immensely enjoyable. Hope this becomes a tradition.
For those waiting for an e-book format, I just tried tossing the PDF into my Kindle’s documents folder and it looks great. The copyright and preface are hard to read, but the base font for the book is perfectly sized.
Apart from one short break for toilet and tiffin, His Obnoxiousness, read ‘The Dark’ at one sitting (two if you include the toilet sitting), punching the air and shouting, "Yeeeaahh!! My kindda woman!!
UNPARDONABLE SPOILER REMOVED. APOLOGIES TO ALL.
“Could do with a good dollop of ‘Honkey-Tonking’, though.”
All in all, I suspect he was impressed with the end result. I was too. I had expected, ‘Noddy the Vampire’ meets ‘Halloween Redux’.
Well done everyone,
Fluff
SORRY FOR SPOILER. Never thought. Sorry
Hey! spoilers
I don’t actually know how it ends yet!
Brian, RonjoI, Fluff & Vic - Glad you enjoyed it.
RonjoI - “The many faces of Jane Scott” - That is totally canon. (Addicted to plastic surgery.)
pigfender, thanks for the hard work before, during, and after “Novel in a Day” day. I had fun doing it, and I gather that the rest of the authors did, too. It wouldn’t have worked without your organization, story, and persistence in the face of technical failures and human limitations.
-- Pete (with revived interest in my long-languishing short story)I have now compiled .epub and .mobi versions of The Dark and made them available for download, along with an updated PDF. I’ve updated the first post in this thread to contain the download links, but I’ll copy the text below, too.
— FROM THE UPDATE TO THE FIRST POST —
Novel-in-a-Day took place on 15th October and is now over - until next time, at least. Everyone that took part had a lot of fun, and for myself, it was liberating to be given a précis and have to sit down and get on with the nuts and bolts of writing for a day, knowing that if I didn’t get it done I’d be letting everyone else down. Liberating, because I have a tendency to fear the blank page and spend all my time arsing around with plans and notes and not getting on with the important part - the writing. I’m sure I’m not alone in that, so on behalf of myself and everyone else who took part, I would like to say thank you to Rog (Pigfender) for organising this event: thanks Pigfender! I know everyone really appreciates all the hard work you put into this.
And if you missed out: well, I’m sure we’ll be doing this again at some point, because it was a great success (although I’m sure none of us makes any great claims about the literary quality of our hasty prose).
The resulting novel is now available below. If you’re coming to this new, please bear in mind that this was written by twenty-four different authors in twenty-four hours. Pigfender wrote an overarching plot and sent each author a summary of their section, along with relevant character sheets, in the early hours of 15th October. Each author then had to complete their section by midnight with no idea what was going on in the rest of the book (technically there was an 8pm deadline, but for many, including myself, that just made the whooshing sound that Douglas Adams used to so love).
The Dark - A Novel in 24 Hours by 24 Authors
All of the above files were compiled from the Mac version of Scrivener. For those who would like to see how they were created, I have also uploaded the Scrivener project and compile formats that were used to generate these files. Please note that, although the Scrivener project can be opened in either the Mac or Windows versions, the compile format presets are Mac-only.
The Dark - Mac Compile Presets (E-Book and PDF formats)
(To load the compile format presets in the Mac version, unzip the file, go to Compile in Scrivener, select “Manage Compile Format Presets…” from the bottom of the “Format As…” menu, click on “Import…” in the panel that appears, and choose the two files that were unzipped. This will add two items to the “Format As” menu: “NIAD - The Dark PDF” and “NIAD - The Dark E-book”.)
Thanks again, Rog!
I have been reading the finished work on my macbook which I hate (I mean I hate reading books on it not hate my macbook, I love my macbook) so many thanks Keith, I have just transferred it on to my Kindle. I think the book so far (only got to chapter 10) is really enjoyable.
A big thanks from me to pigfender/Rog/Tim for the idea, the work, the plot and for letting me join in! I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Forgive my ignorance of copyright lingo, but can I put this on my Facebook page?
Please do.
Basic restrictions are: don’t change the files, and don’t sell 'em.
Just wait until you get to chapter 12; you may die from joy*. Hmm. On second thought, maybe skip it, or at least put your affairs in order first.
In all seriousness, it was a great deal of fun, and I wish I’d not fallen victim to having a social life on the (local) Friday evening when it started. It could have benefited from my sleeping in between rough draft and final edit. Thanks to Rog for pulling this event off, I’ve never written and edited fiction at that kind of frenzied pace, but it was exhilarating.
- Putting the Lie to Keith’s “none of us makes any great claims about the literary quality” statement. For contrariness’s sake. Because I’m ornery like that.
Many, many thanks to Pig for doing such stellar work and many, many thanks to Keith for taking that stellar work and turning it into marvellous ePub and mobi files!
Excellent job, guys.
V.
Just another thanks to the Pig for pulling this together! I still haven’t finished reading it; but so far I’ve enjoyed every page of it. It’s almost like I’m reading of an event from many parallel universes; each one slightly (or way) different and you can only ever see one piece of time in each framework, with only hints of what the past and future might have been like, based on the other pieces.
That would be a great concept for the next one - have the lead character shifting through parallel universes so that all the inconsistencies are excused!
It would indeed. I support that idea!
Sounds a lot like pub closing time, Stockport City Centre.
I’d just like to add my congratulations to Pigfender and all the disparate authors. I haven’t finished reading yet, but I’m impressed with the quality and intensity of each and every chapter, as well as the organizational skills involved overall.
Great work, Scrivgang!
I too would like to thank Pigfender for all the work he put into making this a successful project. This really was a fun project that I hope we can do again.