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The Story
Update: I'm officially a winner for 2004, finishing with 50,162 words. Yay!
I've also gone through and divided the 5 stories, so you don't have to scroll through the whole document.
I have decide to participate in Nano Wrimo, or "National Novel Writing Month," for 2004.
The website for the project provides plenty of information on exactly what Nano Wrimo is, but here's the basic rundown:
Nano is referred to as a "contest," but honestly it's really more of a challenge: to write a novel of 50,000 words in one month. There's no prize and the entries aren't judged by anything other than word count. Before November 1, you register on their website. On or before November 30, participants upload their final work, it's checked and if it passes the 50, 000 mark, you are considered a "winner." What's to stop someone from cheating? Nothing, but then there's not really a prize is there? Only a certificate, and of course glory. So there's no real reason to cheat.
The Nano official site has a profile for each registered user, which includes a space for excerpts. However, in addition to that I'll be using this site to post the full work for those interested. The text is in .rtf format, so it should be openable in Windows Wordpad or any standard text reader.
Also, fair warning, the work contains a bit of profanity at times.
The concept behind my entry is one I've had for quite some time. The title is "Synaesthesia."
So what the heck is that? Well it's 2 things really:
Synaesthesia (n) - 1. In literary terms, it's expressing one of your five senses as though it were another sense. For instance, "sweet sound" or "loud color."
2. In psychological terms, synaesthesia is a real, documented condition where a person experiences one kind of stimulus as though it were another kind. For instance, many of these peope have a natural assocation between certain shapes and certain colors (The letter A is red, the letter B is white, all 2's are orange, etc). Other syaesthetes might hear music and see shapes floating in the air.
At one time, it was believed that synaesthesia was a disorder, but the more modern theories suggest that it's a very natural thing that we all experience at a very young age. Then, as we grow older, our brains harden the cerebral connections between our senses: ear-information and sound processing, eye-information and visual processing, etc. So that, for most of us, we "lose" the ability to understand things in this multi-sensory way.
So what does this have to do with my project? Well, the work will be comprised of 5 individual stories, and each one will be themed around one of the 5 senses. As you might guess, I'm expecting each story to be about 10,000 words.
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1. There will be a lot of typos, spelling errors and other such mistakes. Some of the structural stuff (incomplete sentences, punctuation, etc) is intentional, the rest can be safely attributed to a lack of editing. There's no time for editing, only writing. Nano is about quantity more than quality.
2. Yes I know I could probably just write the same word 50,000 times and be counted as a winner. Yes I know I could have started early and gotten ahead. Yes I know there are lots of ways you could "cheat" your way to being a "winner." So don't bother telling me. This is about the challenge, not the reward.
3. Any (serious) questions/comments about the work are welcomed. If you got here through an e-mail I sent you, then you've already got my address. Anyone else can use my (less often checked, but still used) account at samiam779 (at) gmail.com.
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