Paul Kuliniewicz

Renee asked for it, and guess what I found lurking in the depths of holly’s hard drive? (Where by “depths”, I mean in a clearly named subdirectory under $HOME.) The novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo 2002!

How long ago was 2002? I wrote the novel in StarOffice, of all things. This was back before OpenOffice.org existed to any great degree. Fortunately, I had generated a PDF version of the novel too. Unfortunately, the quality of the PDF was atrocious, since I think I printed to file and then converted the resulting PostScript to PDF via ps2pdf; and I did that because StarOffice’s native “Export to PDF” feature looked even worse.

Fortunately, the current version of OpenOffice.org has a usable “Export to PDF” and can open StarOffice files. Unfortunately, I had uninstalled OpenOffice.org some time ago, probably to free up a good 300 MB of disk space and because I almost never used it. So guess what got reinstalled on kryten to make a legible version of the novel that you’d actually be able to open?

Sheesh, the lengths I go for you people.

I also kept a log of my progress as I wrote. Look on my writing speed, ye mighty, and despair:

Nov 01:     0 today;      0 total
Nov 02: 1,834 today;  1,834 total
Nov 03: 2,314 today;  4,148 total
Nov 04: 2,062 today;  6,210 total
Nov 05: 2,400 today;  8,610 total
Nov 06: 2,431 today; 11,041 total
Nov 07: 2,093 today; 13,134 total
Nov 08: 2,402 today; 15,536 total
Nov 09: 2,013 today; 17,549 total
Nov 10: 2,455 today; 20,004 total
Nov 11: 2,093 today; 22,097 total
Nov 12: 2,403 today; 24,500 total
Nov 13: 2,824 today; 27,324 total
Nov 14: 2,018 today; 29,342 total
Nov 15: 2,101 today; 31,443 total
Nov 16: 2,141 today; 33,584 total
Nov 17: 2,055 today; 35,639 total
Nov 18: 2,141 today; 37,780 total
Nov 19: 2,269 today; 40,049 total
Nov 20: 2,031 today; 42,080 total
Nov 21: 2,005 today; 44,085 total
Nov 22: 2,173 today; 46,258 total
Nov 23: 4,330 today; 50,588 total

For the adventurous, you can read Save Point in the new collector’s “legible PDF” edition. Be warned, though, that I myself have never read it, let alone edited it any, so there’s no assurance of any quality whatsoever. But seeing as how I was posting it on the Internet as I was writing it back in the day, any possible embarassment has already been done.

For those two lazy to read 50,588 words, here’s the four-word synopsis of the plot: “Self-inflicted Groundhog Day“.