Hello all,
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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!
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The various sections will then be pulled together and compiled (using Scrivener, of course) by midnight the same day. The finished novel will be made available for download the next day.
Apologies for those based in other timezones. For reasons of organisational efficiency we have had to base everything on Cornwall Standard Time.
The equivalent times in other areas would therefore be:
Portland, Oregon: 5pm, Friday October 14th to 1pm, Saturday October 15th
Sydney, Australia: 10am, Saturday October 15th to 6am, Sunday October 16th,
From a legal point of view, everyone will retain copyright in their own contributions, although will grant others (including L&L) the right to distribute the whole on a free / non-commercial basis. We may also make it available for free download on eBook sites if suitably proud of the output! Everyone contributing will get a credit showing which bit they added (unless they opt out).
The Next Step
If you want to get your writing arm warmed up ready for NaNoWriMo, or you just want the chance to say you’ve written a novel with Keith, simply sign up below.
