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My artist buddy Darrell is also a fan of Philip K. Dick, and the other night I got home to find a whole bag of these books sitting on my front porch, a gift of literary loan from the man. It’s awesome, but really makes me wonder just how on earth I’m going to get all this stuff read in addition to my other stuff that’s already crowding the house!
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I had to play a gig tonight, so I couldn’t participate in the write-in for this evening. That was lame, because it’s the one that I pretty much put together last year and re-organized this year. However, I was able to stop in and see all my friends before I hit the road to play. I was envious of them all sitting around the table working together. Writing is often such a solitary pursuit that it’s really nice when the opportunity arises to share the moment with a bunch of like-minded wackos, and these are some really cool wackos, I assure you.
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Heading in to work…again.
At approximately 6:43 last night I hit the magical fifty thousand word mark for NaNoWriMo. That’s fifty thousand words in twenty-two days which works out to an average of…two thousand, two hundred, seventy-two words (plus point seventy-two repeating) per day. That’s a fun average, considering that the first day I wrote something like five or six hundred words, and there were many days where I only wrote the minimun average, which is 1,667. Obviously, on a few days here and there I exceeded the minimun, as on the 21st, when I wrote eight thousand.
This means that, were I to stop writing now, I would still officially win the challenge. The story is not done, though, so I push on. I’m really hoping to finish this thing by midnight on the 30th. I don’t know how it’s supposed to end, though, so it’s hard to say. This reminds me of a joke I’ve heard among the fantasy and sci-fi crowd being that the way to please a publisher is to write a trilogy, as it ensures sales for three books instead of just one. Personally, I’ll be happy if I’m able to finish writing a single book without having to worry about what might come next. Whether I or anyone else wants to read this after I’m done is an entirely different matter altogether.
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One of my fellow WriMos is also a violinist with the local orchestra. She played today, and was generous enough to provide me with a ticket to the show. I had an excellent time there. Unfortunately, the lighting was pretty terrible, and I didn’t want to disturb anyone by using flash, so this is what you get. A bit fuzzy.
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Saturdays our NaNo region schedules a write-in at a local coffee shop. It’s one of my favorite places to write. It’s kind of the big write-in of the week during NaNo, and a lot of people make the effort to get out and say hello and pound/scribble out a few words there. We had a good turnout, and I made some awesome progress with something like an eight thousand word jump that day.
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Friday night was a write-in at a local Border’s. A group of us gathered our laptops around the only available outlet and wrote many, many, many words. It was like a little literary laptop fire pit that we were huddled around.
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I hit forty thousand words. It felt a little amazing. Close to the goal!
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Dinner was mostly pumpkin loaf and coffee, but word production continued just fine.
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Here are a bunch of us camped out at Starbucks getting in our word count for the evening. You can even see our little NaNoWriMo table tent thingie that we set up just for such grand occasions. That, and my blueberry scone. See the girl above and to the left? She’s in fifth grade. She’s writing 30 thousand words during the month. By hand. If you have excuses for why you’re not doing something, this girl is proof that “it can be done, one way or another.” There’s a zombie cat in her book, by the way. Just thought you’d like to know. NaNo is work, but there’s more than enough room to have fun with it as well.