Wednesday, November 10, 2010

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.


5 comments:

  1. Good for you! Keep going!!! Nice Studio 44 by the way. I like them, but they're a little on the big side for me, at least as far as portables go! But, they're amazing machines! By the way, I just scored an amazing typewriter, FOR FREE! I'll tell you more in the next typecast!

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  2. I have a love/hate relationship with the 44. After you've typed a long stretch on it, you'll understand what I mean. I do like that it looks like a prehistoric sea-bottom dweller.

    A while back I got the urge out of the blue to paint a typer purple. The 44 seemed like the ideal candidate, as I had a spare. It looks pretty good in purple. Partially inspired by your "hot rod Voss" mockup from ETCetera, I'm tempted to put flames on the sides as well.

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  3. My 44 is a script machine, so (for whatever reason) it doesn't get the NaNo attention of its non-script cousins.
    There's something optical-illusionish about the case of these things. They seem way bigger on the outside than on the inside. The machine (which is in the same size/dimentional category as a Voss or, I suppose, an SM-7) fits in there snugly, without a whole bunch of extra room, but when you set the case next to your other typers-in-cases, the 44's seems HUGE. Not sure how they do that. Or why they made it so drastically wedge-shaped (unless, that is, they wanted to guarantee that the 44 would NEVER be at the bottom of a stack of typewriters).

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  4. I'd agree that the Studio, the Voss, and the later SM's are in the same category of typewriter, but I measure the back to front dimension of the Studio as 15 inches, whereas the Voss Deluxe and my SM8 are under 13 inches.

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  5. Hmm. Perhaps my ruler needs professionally re-calibrated.
    Maybe the optical illusion is in the size of the machine, not the size of the case?

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