I am visually impaired since birth and before the usual comments arise: No, glasses don’t help completely, contact lenses also don’t and are so uncomfortable to me that I don’t want them and the remaining impediment is still significant. I also live in a foreign country (the UK) since September, for studying software engineering in cooperation with the college in Germany where I studied the first 2 years. As you might have guessed, I am German. (You have read my rather aggressive introduction, concerning my disability. I have to excuse for this, but most people don’t take it seriously and confuse muddling and scraping through with having no difficulties. I had almost no support at school and college in Germany and thus often had to justify for my difficulties.)

Computers always were different and always alluring. In the era of the DOS-prompts and EGA graphics, screens were easily readable and the lack of peripheral vision was not an issue at all. This was one of the reasons, why I got into computers, programming and creative processes using them as a hobby and later as a possible carreer. The fact that NaNoWriMo only requires a computer, creativity and time was one of the reasons why I felt interested in it since quite a while already: I felt like competing with others on equal ground, unimpaired.

I did NaNoWriMo last year under almost ideal circumstances: college had a low workload, my computer was quick and had a large CRT screen, and I had the support of the German/Cologne community. This year was not as ideal: university in the UK is more stressful than private German college classes, I could not bring my main system to England because I moved by train. This meant that all writing had to be done on a netbook with a 9 inch screen. Another big shock was the size of the community, or rather: its lack of said attribute. I thought the fact that England requires many groups while “Europe :: Germany & Austria” is one was related to the number of active people in it. I must have been wrong: The forum had 1 thread when I registered and never got past one page. Despite this, I won and reached the verified word count of last year (66666 words).

Why have I been so crazy? Mostly because I had a good story and a plot. I often write out of a feeling of alienation and this year, I had sufficient amounts of that (being in a different country without family, boyfriend or friends) that the story flowed rather easily. I have not finished it yet, but I feel connected to it and I feel that I can finish it gracefully (unlike my first NaNovel, which is finished but the end is illogical and probably rushed). The strange feeling when saying something and the other person reacts as if something completely different was said was a powerful inspiration.

Having to write on a netbook, I had to be creative concerning the tools, I used. Office programs are fond of either rending the text unreadably small or requiring lots of horizontal scrolling. Thus, I wrote text in my favorite text editor (called joe) in Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, since I can read that font easily even when it is not that huge. I still set my terminal to a font size which makes 80 characters per line fill the screen. Since this setup means that the resulting text is quite differently formatted from text someone else might want to read, I formatted the text in the typesetting system LaTeX (it only required a few commands to copy and paste unlike, for example HTML and seeing the beautifully formatted text, LaTeX produced was very inspiring to me, it made my text look like it was of far better quality). Despite the font, I leaned forward far too much. I must have looked occasionally as if I wanted to crawl into the screen. That meant backache after a few weeks, which was annoying. Heatpads helped against the pain and their presence reminded me to sit correctly. During the last week, I always used one on my back when writing.

What I have learnt in this NaNoWriMo was mainly… that a certain amount of abandon, of ignoring the stuff out there and focussing on one thing is something helpful. Instead of worrying about countless little things which do not matter in the end (like mispronouncing things, which was always a fear for me in stores), it forced my mind to work towards one goal and only one. I have learned other things, like the time it takes to travel from Southampton to London and the name of Washington D.C. in Esperanto, but the importance and joy of an extreme, narrow and specific focus was something I had almost forgotten.

`If you are visually impaired and consider NaNo, I say go for it. You might not finish and it is not easy, but the feeling when you are completely in the story and when you see that the text you wrote in one month is more than 100 pages is incredible. (And if it is of any consolation to you: look into the fora, especially `NaNoWriMo Ate My Soul’ and you will see that unimpaired NaNovellers struggle equally hard.)