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.]
I'm following your method, scan to PDF at work and then OCR is at onlineocr.net. It nice and accurate, but I realized that I am only going to get 10 pages OCR'd for free.
So, are you paying or working on getting bonus credits? I could do a link (for 50 credits) and a review (for 200 credits)…
I'm paying. Their rates are cheap:
50 pages : $ 3.95 (8 cents per page)
100 pages : $ 5.95 (6 cents per page)
250 pages : $ 9.95 (4 cents per page)
500 pages : $ 14.95 (3 cents per page)
1000 pages : $ 19.95 (2 cents per page)
2000 pages : $ 29.95 (1,5 cent per page)
5000 pages : $ 49.95 (1 cent per page)
I don't get it, Richard. Where's the typos? Where's the goof-ups and the shoddy writing? This makes me want to drop a Selectric on my own head. Goshdarnit you're good.
the only metaphor for my first two days is too disgusting to share. Let's just say my inner editor is inconsolable and leave it at that.
I'm scanning at home but the single-spaced pages really help keep the page count down. I'm at 2155 now, and the techno font scans better than anything else so far. Typos are a pain since I correct them to get an accurate count on upload.