It's been a relatively quiet month. Alan Holman has made his triumphant and frequently suppressed return as the user TrutherWriter, whose novel synopsis includes such gems as:

Tim is real, but Israel is a CIA/MOSSAD creation. Black helecoptors, paranoid dreams ... 9/11 was an inside job -- you know it, you feel it, you pump your fist, you're a champion of the truth! Vaccines cause autism whether Tim's teacher thinks different. Why the hell do the girls that chase Tim so violently get a couch in their bathrooms while non-violent Tim gets a not-chocolate surprise that takes some time to wash out the stink!

His regular posts don't make much more sense either, but sadly I cannot link to any of them as they've all been suppressed for being abusive towards others or using profanity.

But I know what you really want, OTFers; news on the infamous marienbadmylove. What's this? you ask. Surely he was banned last year for plagiarism? Well, apparently being banned twice didn't stop Alan Holman, and being banned a mere once hasn't stopped Mark Leach, whose surname is (almost) quite apropos. Thus far his one and only post is in the Extreme Accomplishments Shoutout thread, as follows:

Success! I just crossed the 500,000-word mark with “A Canadian Marienbad,” my Nano entry and literary tribute to the people of Canada. I created the manuscript over a couple of hours by using a do-it-yourself novel kit I read about in the letters section of the infamous Laura Miller story on Salon.com. Starting with the basic 50,000-word template, I repeatedly pressed the copy and paste button in order to push the manuscript past one million words. Then I used my computer’s find and replace editing functions to customize the text with Canadian concepts and themes, turning it into my own story. By the end of the month I expect to expand my manuscript to five million words. Shouldn’t be too hard. After all, it’s just a matter of repeatedly pressing CTRL-V, then adding in my own ideas. But I will need to be careful not to strain my index finger!

Well, at least we assume it's the same author. He's posting under the name bccomox, also on LiveJournal, and so far this is his only post. Time will tell if there is more wank yet to be mined from this source.

The prize for NaNoWanker of the Year, however, undoubtedly goes to Laura Miller, whose article on Salon.com, Better yet, DON'T write that novel drew the ire of a multitude of NaNo participants, who didn't appreciate being told their work was a waste of time, nor the implication that because they were writers, not readers, they were doing the publishing world a disservice. Word of advice to Ms. Miller: writers fairly often also happen to be readers. They also happen to be capable of reading your ill-informed article and taking umbrage.

It just makes this wanka wonder where Miller thinks professional writers come from. Here's a hint: they do not spring fully formed from the forehead of some fantastic literary deity. They start out small and end up big. And for some of them, that start is NaNoWriMo.

Some of you may remember this wank from last year, revolving around a certain individual who decided to claim he'd 'won' NaNoWriMo by copying and pasting pages from Wikipedia and so on into Word and then using find and replace until it was a 'completely new and unique literary work'.

Well, he's back. With his profile page proudly boasting of last year's 'achievement' thusly:

My debut with NaNoWriMo was in 2008, when I completed a 2.5-million-word draft titled "The President Who Exploded." This work is what I call a “non-linear literary collage.” It consists of materials I mined from various blogs, chat rooms and fan fiction sites. I'm a word rustler. I prowl the talk pages of Wikipedia, the reader comments on io9.com and various venues frequented by anonymous bloggers. I shamelessly plagiarize their words -- even their misspellings and gramatical errors -- then transform the stolen content into a new and unique literary product through a series of computer-assisted modifications (cut-up engines, Markov generators, search and replace functions, etc.) and combinations with recycled content from my own writings. These are techniques I first explored in “Marienbad My Love,” the world's longest novel. Released in 2008, this 17-million-word creation also sets records for the world's longest word, sentence and book title.

Which, notably, is copypasta from his own website. Self-plagiarism must be the literary equivalent of sitting on your hand until it goes numb before masturbating.

Modus operandi announced, he trots into the 'Reaching the MILLION ...... NaNoWriMo 2009' The following exchange ensues:

marienbadmylove: I logged 2.5 million words last year. I'm swinging for 999,999-plus again this time. Let the good times roll!

Kateness: you know I don't think your words count, on the basis of our disagreement last year.
BUT
because the rules explicitly say I can't call you a cheater, I won't, because god knows that rule has helped me in the past, and we'll just leave it at that. If you think it's a win, it's a win (Just kindly keep your hands off any excerpts I may post, and my blog if you're so inclined), and that's all I'm going to say about this.

marienbadmylove: Ah, but how can you stop me? *snip some drivel about William Burroughs*

Dragonchilde (forum moderator extraordinaire: OH NO YOU DIDN'T *cites rules stating why he can't threaten to steal other Wrimos' writing*

marienbadmylove: *more gibberish about Burroughs that is kind of really not applicable in this situation at all*

Rest of responses: *dogpile without explicitly calling him a cheater* The best of which is Angolera's: There's a huge difference between writing 2.5 million words and using 2.5 million words.

marienbadmylove: *disappears from thread*

But where is he now? Oh, here he is, announcing his intention to hit 50,000 words on Day One to give himself a 'little cushion' on his way to the million. Please note he never states he's going to write these words, and is yet to return to the thread to pass comment on whether he is typing these words or using a voice recognition system. Funny about that.

And it's not even November yet...

Edit: Classic response from painkillers regarding the need of someone shooting for a million to sleep: Sleep? SLEEP? sleep is for writers, I'm a conceptual artist I am. ga ga goo goo ga ga, gin gang gooly, see it is the conception of the words that matter, not the words themselves. i don't need to sleep, because i don't use my brain -- for anything.

Son of edit: He reaches 50K!

Someone claims to have 'won' NaNoWriMo with 2.5 million words, a feat so fantabulous it apparently requires announcing twice.

Unfortunately, checking out his website reveals that he used a less than conventional technique to reach this count:

In order to compile so many words in such a short time, Leach leaned heavily on the Internet. He generated what he calls a “non-linear literary collage” by mining various blogs, chat rooms and fan fiction sites, grabbing whatever words caught his eye.

“The talk pages of Wikipedia and the reader comments on io9.com were my absolute favorites,” he said. “These are my people. I shamelessly plagiarized their words -- even their misspellings and gramatical errors -- at every opportunity, combining the anonymous messages with recycled content from ‘Marienbad My Love’ and entries from my dream journal. I repeatedly cut and pasted and searched and replaced, transforming the various writings into a completely new and unique literary work.”

NaNoers are Not Amused.

Edited to add the best replies from the forums so far:

yukongold: Plagiarizing other peoples' words is not writing. It's plagiarism, pure and simple, contrary to the spirit of Nano.

Not to mention that your pretense is so thick you could stand on it and not worry about sinking for a good three hours.

Sashimisan: Exactly.

I have more respect for someone who struggled to cross the finish line with 50K of their own words than I do for a plagiarist who filled a document with thousands of pages of nonsense.

sniderman: Next year, I plan to do the same thing for my NaNo. I plan to title it "The Stand by Stephen King."

MrHeywire: You, my dear dirtysockface, deserve to have all your clean underwear burned, your washing machine broken and your water cut off. How dare you claim to be an author when not one word was arranged into a sentence by your miserable self this month!
Even without you, those of us who have done this honestly have still surpassed a total 1.5 billion words, so I have no reason to not wish your word count to be retracted from the totals.

Wishing your head to be lovingly placed in a bucket of cement;
--Me

Son of edit:

MrHeywire's post is deleted, but oh, the replacement is STELLAR.

marienbadmylove: Hey MrHeywire, your post is one of my favorites to date. A couple of people have wished violence upon me, but you’re the first who actually wanted to see me dead (in a loving way, of course). Still, I liked this post slightly better: “But you are using other people's words. I feel that the point of NaNo is to write in your own words.” Here is my point: They are my own words! I stole them, and now they belong to me. That’s what I do. I’m an auto thief. I knock out the driver’s side window, hot wire the ignition and take off for the local chop shop. I file off the VIN numbers and strip out the valuable parts. I bolt various body panels together into a stylistic abomination. I re-spray the thing vomit green, add insulting graffiti along the fenders and hang a crap-scented air freshener from the rear view mirror (to cover up the stench of the dead body in the trunk). Twenty-eight days later, I drive it to the local car show and park it alongside the other entries. Look, people are throwing rotten tomatoes at it. What fun! How will I top myself for the 2009 NaNoWriMo? Here’s an idea: steal synopsis and excerpt texts from the “Novel Info” sections of this year’s winners. Already a story idea is beginning to form… A guy in a government post, who has an entirely contended existence, abruptly and lacking reason, packs his vomit green automobile with objects such as his nativity record, crap-scented air freshener and a severed head in a bucket of cement and maneuvers away.

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you ... the first NaNoWriMo wank of the year!

If you've been to the boards since October, you'll know they've been slow, and that the search function has had to be disabled on and off several times to deal with the load. if you've been around for previous Octobers, you know this is pretty much par for the course whenever that year's boards go up and registration opens -- the site gets flooded, things slow down, the NaNo techies whack things with sticks until things settle down to normality somewhere in the first week of November, usually.

This year, however, this is all causing a smattering of wankery:

"I'm taking my toys and going home!"
"Me too!"
"Me three!"

Small, but tasty. Like aa petit four, in a way.

me, i just wish my t-shirt, mug and merit badges would get here already. woe.