All of 22 years, Pune-based Aditya Bidikar is a translator by profession. But going by the number of hours he spends blogging, you can be forgiven to think that is his real occupation. Bidikar is also the creator of Novel Race, an online community where anybody writing a novel could compete with fellow writers in an effort to finish their novel first.

“It was while I was starting my new novel that this idea came up and I was motivated to write more. So, I asked my friends to follow each other on the Novel Race,” says Bidikar, whose blog is at www.aditya.wordpress.com. “It started with my friend Samit Basu calling for a wordcount race on Twitter. The motive was simple enough – to tell each other, ‘Write, write’. And perhaps to point and laugh when you’re ahead,” he adds. “So here’s where we are right now. Finish a novel (‘novel’ here would mean anything – screenplay, play, graphic novel script, non-fiction or, of course, fiction – exceeding 60,000 words) by October 31, 2009,” informs this graduate of Fergusson College. “Meet on Twitter, update, heckle each other and make a tally every weekend. Everyone is welcome,” he adds.

A short and compact form of blog, microblogging offers the perfect setting for an activity such as this. The rules are pretty simple: anyone who completes a novel of 60,000 words or above by the end of October this year will be given a finished book as the prize. “At the end of every day, all participants post their updated word count for their novel on the group and writers are ranked based on the word count,” says Bidikar. “Members of the group exchange notes on the changes in their story plots, joke about their characters and discuss aspects like the ideal length of a chapter,” he adds.

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