NaNoWriMo, the Novel

[moonmilk]

I'm working on scraping twitter for tweets about #NaNoWriMo and assembling them into a book. I'll let you know how it goes.

Like pulling teeth, but I made my word count. Although I was hoping to write more today, at least, I wrote over 1,000 words. So far, I've written a total of 16,000 words. Below my goal but I'll make up for it tomorrow!! " Perhaps I need another? Checking in on my characters. I have a feeling they were up to no good while I was working today. Now I'm finding out how bad at chess I am. If I were writing an epistolatory novel in tweets, I'd be finished already.

I would love to promote your book for free on a dozen of my accounts! I love it when your writing surprises you. I really seem to be digging myself deeper into an awareness of the awfulness of humanity. Not sure how that happened but I dont' intend to get second week ones too.. I am far, far behind schedule right now. I'm fairly certain I have changed this character's name at three three times so far. See how long I can stay on par now...

Oh well, I'm already working on 3 first drafts and a short story for school, why not add another! These busy workdays zap my creative energy but I worked through it tonight. I'll go strong tomorrow. Still behind a bit, but I'm catching up! Not as much as I'd like but since I had a late start after a busy day, I'm ok with it. Guess I'll be making up for it tomorrow.

[moonmilk]

For this project, I'm trying out pattern http://www.clips.uantwerpen.be/pattern for the first time.

[moonmilk]

If you can't think of a title for your novel, my wrimo-titler.py will steal one for you, from people's #nanowrimo posts on twitter.

https://github.com/moonmilk/nanogenmo2014

[y-a-v-a]

Nice conceptual approach! What's the status? I'm curious for the outcome.

[moonmilk]

I haven't collected 50,000 words from twitter yet (rate limits), but I'm gonna try to generate a test novella this afternoon.

[moonmilk]

32K word novelette and all the code, now at https://github.com/moonmilk/nanogenmo2014

[lizadaly]

Ha ha this is great!

[y-a-v-a]

I really like the result so far!

[moonmilk]

I like the implication that you've read all 32K words and you're looking forward to the long version :)

(Thanks!)

[hugovk]

Good stuff! You can really feel the struggle yet self-determination!

Another source could be the NaNoWriNo forums, but I think tweets are more self-contained. And you should easily hit 50k by month's end (now, that's a NaNoWriMo-esque sentence!).

[moonmilk]

It seems like it'd take only 3-4 days of #nanowrimo tweets to make a novel. I'll make another on the 30th and it should have a very different feel to it.

It would be interesting to try this with different search strings - maybe that could be an online short-story-on-request generator.

On Sunday, November 16, 2014, Hugo notifications@github.com wrote:

Good stuff! You can really feel the struggle yet self-determination!

Another source could be the NaNoWriNo forums, but I think tweets are more self-contained. And you should easily hit 50k by month's end (now, that's a NaNoWriMo-esque sentence!).

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2014/issues/99#issuecomment-63222932 .

[hugovk]

An idea: earlier chapters from earlier tweets, later chapters from later tweets, and the last chapter from tweets from the last day of November.

[moonmilk]

Yes! The current system randomizes the tweets to get rid of any time based correlations, but that sounds better. Wanna fork the project?

On Sunday, November 16, 2014, Hugo notifications@github.com wrote:

An idea: earlier chapters from earlier tweets, later chapters from later tweets, and the last chapter from tweets from the last day of November.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2014/issues/99#issuecomment-63225349 .

[moonmilk]

I have 40K words collected so far. Should be done by tomorrow. Sooner if I get impatient and dig further into the past.

[moonmilk]

47K words! Almost there! Wait, I'm talking like the protagonist of my novel now. Latest test run at novelette3.md and novelette3.pdf.

I really like the way the latest version begins:

Thus die I, thus, thus, thus. My backup machine ate my last chapter. Any ways I can help out my fellow writers? Cannot think of how to write this scene, so I’m going to catch up on Sailor Moon Crystal and have lunch. This brings me up to 25,552 for the month of November.

Now that's writing, amirite?

I wanted the PDF to look more like a cheap paperback and less like the printout of a web page, so I added some @page css and a slightly tacky google font. novelette3.pdf really feels like a trade paperback from the 1990s now, at least to me. Check out wrimo.css and novelette3.html for the details.

[moonmilk]

It's done! https://github.com/moonmilk/nanogenmo2014/blob/master/novel.pdf?raw=true About 50.5K words.

@dariusk, may i have a COMPLETED tag please? :)

[hugovk]

Looks great, and I like the title too!

Tip: append ?raw=true to URLs of things like text files to see the whole plain text file, and to PDFs to have them download immediately. For example https://github.com/moonmilk/nanogenmo2014/blob/master/novel.pdf?raw=true

[moonmilk]

Thanks!

And thanks for the tip - updated!

[lilinx]

I love this !

[MichaelPaulukonis]

Next year (or over the next week?), @moonmilk, you should do a NaNoWriMo Roman à clef about building a NaNoGenMo project that scrapes NaNoWriMo tweets.

Live-tweet your progress, please.

.....

FAIL WHALE: recursion stack exceeds rational levels

[DHDPIC]

Great idea! Check out this book that has been published by penguin.

[MichaelPaulukonis]

EXTERMINATE ALL RATIONAL LEVELS

[moonmilk]

Closed as WONTEXTERMINATE

[cpressey]

Pfft, Penguin? That's fine, I guess, if you're an established post-conceptual artist with a name that certainly sounds made-up (even if it isn't.) But the real intelligentsia, I tell you, know you're only going to find truly cutting-edge work at obscure little online publishing houses like Github.

[MichaelPaulukonis]

TEKELI-LI! TEKELI-LI!

[moonmilk]

My first novel was generated at the middle of National Novel Writing Month, so I just now made another one for the end of the month. It has quite a different flavor! And a new automatically-stolen title: The Power of a Title.

[The Power of a Title: Title Makes the World Go Round](https://cdn.rawgit.com/moonmilk/nanogenmo2014/master/The Power of a Title.pdf)

[y-a-v-a]

+1! It surprises me how much people appear to tweet about amounts of words... (I read only one and a half chapter though)

[moonmilk]

:)

Another approach would be to collect only tweets that mention numbers of words, and then sort them by quantity.