Rethinking NaNoWriMo Midway

I had a huge breakthrough yesterday when I learned how I can "re-mix" public domain books from the Internet Archive by copying-and-pasting whole PDF pages into a new PDF of my own. That's how I created a 300-page book that didn't exist before yesterday: African Folktales in the Fairy Books of Andrew Lang. I uploaded the book to the Internet Archive where it is downloadable, searchable, linkable. See all the details here: Andrew Lang's African Folktales.

It's so obvious now that I've done it... but somehow I had never thought about it before, probably because I don't work with PDFs very much. PDF is a terrible format in many ways, but it does have this advantage: because a "page" is like an image, it means you can copy-and-paste pages of a PDF book as easily as you copy-and-paste images. I wish I had known about this when I was teaching! I relied on public domain books in my classes, but I either just linked to the book online at Internet Archive (or Hathi or Sacred Texts, etc.), or else I transcribed the text and published it at a website (like my Myth-Folklore UnTextbook). Linking was easy, but that meant students had to navigate the book on their own, whereas transcribing was time-consuming. There are some advantages to having the actual text transcribed, yes, but for my purposes time was the biggest obstacle. Now I have a fast-and-easy way to create my own PDF anthologies.

So, that is making me rethink what I've been doing here with the public domain stories. I've been transcribing and lightly editing, which was working pretty well: it meant I was focusing on stories that I really like, and also trying to make those stories more accessible with the light editing. But at the same time, I was missing out on important things: just light editing is not always enough to make a story really accessible to modern readers, for example, and it's also the case that some of these books have the original African language text which I could not transcribe myself because I wouldn't be able to check my work as I can with English.

Now that I can do a PDF book with the actual pages from the original, that frees me up in so many ways! It frees me up to do more radical editing, knowing that someone will be able to immediately consult my source. It also allows me to include the original African language text where available, and also the original illustrations if any. 

I'm still just trying to process all of this, but my thought is that I will focus now on doing a kind of hybrid project:

* retelling the stories more freely than I have been, starting with the public domain version but being more bold in making changes, converting indirect speech to dialogue, adding in some additional material for context, etc.

* creating a PDF-only book that will have my versions of the stories PLUS the pages from the public domain books I am working from

* creating a Pressbooks book just with my versions of the stories, but making sure people can quickly access the PDF version for more information

So, I've got two more weeks of NaNoWriMo to play with this and see what happens. I'm excited to have a chance to really edit these texts now and see what comes out; that's a new kind of writing experience for me, and I'm curious to give it a try!