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Scrambled, over hard

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Every year Chris and I have a talk about the scramblers.

According to Chris (and I believe him) there are a lot of people out there in NaNoLand who are worried about shielding their works from plagiarism, and making sure that no potential publisher will feel that anything uploaded to www.nanowrimo.org counts as a first publication.

Unfortunately, to become an official NaNoWriMo winner, you have to upload your novel (or something!) to the word count validator.

What gets uploaded to the validator gets saved as file in a temporary folder on the server. After the counting, the temporary file is deleted. The novel has a very brief life as a temporary file on the server.

However, someone could, I suppose, find a way to access the temp folder and copy stuff at just the right time. Or someone could, I suppose, not believe my explanation about the very brief life of the very temporary files.

And that's fine! No one should have to believe me just to win NaNoWriMo. And that's why, every year, we post the best instructions we can about how to scramble your novel before uploading it to the validator.

These instructions are long and kind of complicated and are a pain to execute. Every year I lobby for shorter, more concise instructions. Every year Chris lobbies for a magical, cross-platform, completely safe and user-friendly document scrambler that we can provide for people so that we don't need instructions at all.

As far as I know, there is no such beast. Normal encryption software won't do - we need to preserve the white space between charaters! ROT-13 is too easy.

So I'm blogging for advice - does anyone know of any good Windows, Mac, or online tools for scrambling eggs the way we need them scrambled around here?

Scrambed Eggs



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