In fact, the 2004 novel placed as a runnerup (top 4) in a national contest in 2006.
Christ that's impressive. A winner is you! I know a girl who does it every year too, but her stuff is mostly just random and hilarious because of it. I can't even imagine doing something of quality in so short a time.
Well, to be fair, I wrote the first 50K words in November of that year and then wrote the final 25K and did the copy editing later in the next year. I never finish a piece during NaNo, because a novel's more than 50K words, but I always get enough momentum to finish it later.
I might do some of my typing this year on a gargantuan IBM Selectric typewriter I just got from eBay last week!
Yeah, it gets good paper coverage and will OCR scan really well. I won't use it every day, and certainly not when I'm out at a library or coffee shop (ha ha ha, this thing weighs a ton), but there's something strangely productive about seeing the paper MOVE and hearing the machine hum and click and clack...
But I digress.... I use NaNo calendar desktops all month to remind me constantly what word count I should hit on any given day....
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"Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
Here's my work desktop. I like my screen resolution to be the max possible, if you couldn't tell.
For obvious reasons, I had to hide my icons.
__________________ "I was walking down the street with my friend and he said, "I hear music", as if there is any other way you can take it in. You're not special, that's how I receive it too. I tried to taste it but it did not work." - Mitch Hedberg