Appointment with the Inferno

Winner by a nose: 50,237 words.

Here's the complete text of Appointment with the Inferno (16MB).

My Royal KMM's platen is off to Ames for a well-deserved recovering -- and I need a recovery too!

Finale on Monday

I wrote a lot today and am sure I'll be posting the conclusion to the story on Monday. Overall, this has been a most satisfying experience. Thank you, NaNoWriMo!

Installment 12

Word count: 45,369.

I made great progress over Thanksgiving. The climax is just around the corner!

Installment 11

Word count: 35,148.

I'm slipping behind, due to a mountain of work and a faltering plot. Wish me luck as I enter the final week!

Happy Thanksgiving to all WriMos, typecasters, and other misfits.

Installment 11

Installment 10

Word count: 33,974.

Installment 9

Word count: 30,658.

Installment 8

27,069 words. I'm really overworked at the moment -- November is a bad month for me -- but I'm squeezing this in. For this morning's writing session I used the Olympia SG1, just for variety.

Installment 7

24,493 words. Nearly halfway there!

I needed to pick up some speed this weekend, so I turned to the Royal KMM. It's machine-gun fast when you need it to be. I like this typewriter more every time I use it. I also got satisfaction from checking an old repair manual and finding out how to fix a tabulator problem it was having. Now its only flaw is a hard, slick platen. Maybe next month I'll get it recovered by Ames.

Installment 6

Word count: 18,906. I'm about 1100 words behind schedule.

Fiction writing really does work the way they say: your characters do things you didn't expect, and people walk into your story from real life. (My "Lauren Ayres" is directly based on a woman I saw at the supermarket.)

The typewriters are also working just the way they're supposed to: keeping me moving along by making it too hard to "x" out all the dreck I just wrote. Inner Critic, abandon all hope!

Installment 5

15,755 words.

Some of them (pp. 24-26) were written with a new NaNoWriMa, an Olivetti Studio 44 that I bought in West Virginia. It's a strange, long, luggable typewriter with a weird shape and color, and a peculiar charm.

I'm happy to have shot beyond the length I reached for NaNoWriMo 2008. This is now the longest piece of fiction I've ever written.

Installment 4

I'm enjoying the writing even though I'm a bit behind. A trip to West Virginia for a typewriter collectors' meeting provided some inspiration. The towns of Washington, PA, Wheeling, WV, and Zanesville, OH helped me to imagine my fictional New Lisbon.

Installment 3

Unexpected tools of the trade this time around: I found myself with time and inspiration while waiting in the lobby of my daughter's dance school, so in the absence of a typewriter I used my fountain pen (a Pilot Namiki vanishing point pen, if you're curious). And at the office today, I used my gold Olympia, which I have to say felt great. I continue to write on Eaton's Berkshire Typewriter Paper.

Current word count: 6,809.

Installment 2

I won't be going to Montreal -- a boring/frustrating story that I'll spare you -- but I will be going to the typewriter collectors' meeting in West Virginia this weekend. Between now and then, there are plenty of opportunities to write. So far I'm on track, with 4967 words.

Installment 1

At 6 am this morning I decided I wouldn't be sleeping anymore. Why not get started on the novel! Down in the basement, the Noiseless was waiting. I rolled in the first sheet. Writing the first sentence, the first page, was tough. Then at the office this morning, two more pages came out, a little more easily. Total: 1904 words in 1.5 hours. (I made a PDF using our copy machine and OCR'ed it at onlineocr.net so I could do an automatic word count.) Three typewritten single-spaced pages seem to yield my daily quota.

I think I'm off to a decent start. Now we'll see if I can keep it up. This month I don't expect to have much time for typecasting, trolling eBay, or other pursuits. The novel is it. I plan to post updates here every once in a while, and I'd be interested in seeing other people's typescripts if they're willing to share. But let's make a promise: no specific comments about the content of our stories, positive or negative, until the end of November. We don't want to make each other too self-conscious!


[Later note: I have deleted the separate installments of the novel, but you can find the whole text in the last post for this month.]