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It may not look like a gala event, but spirits were high at the coffee shop where we held our TGIO party following the end of yet another fantastic November for NaNoWriMo. It’s largely a general bag session, although things change from year to year, and apparently sometimes it’s been a bit more formal or dinner-oriented. One thing that is a continuing tradition, regardless of venue, is the reading of Autosummarized Novels.

There’s this function on Microsoft Word called “Autosummary.” What the true purpose for this is I have no idea, but it makes for big fun when combined with a novel of many thousands of words. What you do is, you highlight all your text, then select the function, and you can trim down your 50K-word novel to a summary of most-occurred phrases or sentences of between five hundred lines and ten words. We usually go for about 100 or 200 words. We gather these up and read them out loud, and they all sound rather ridiculous and repetitive and completely nonsensical – which kind of sums up how a lot of us feel while we’re in the middle of writing a novel of 50 thousand words in the time frame of a single month!