National Novel Writing Month

In circumstances rather less than coincidental, a conspicuous absence of November posts coincided with my participation in NaNoWriMo (national novel writing month). Thus, throughout last month, I had a great — if difficult — time writing what might be described as a shallow antithesis to the next Great American Novel. Ever so sadly, fifty thousand words was not enough to contain the deep complexities of my story, but as such trivialities have no bearing on whether one actually wins the challenge, all ended reasonably well.

As this blog serves a largely technical purpose, I ought to mention my use of latex (specifically, LaTeXIT) for all of November’s writings. This decision was mostly to my benefit — the pdf files produced look wonderful, and the memoir package made chapter organization easy — but it also beget a few annoyances. For instance, getting decent word count updates was rather non-trivial, and the NaNoWriMo site does not accept pdf or tex files for verification. Ultimately, however, my experience was a positive one, and I would recommend latex to future participants.

In any case, I can assure the nonexistent reader that this blog should become more active in future days and weeks.