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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.
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I don’t know what this thing was, but it was running down the road headed for a construction site near where I work. It was awesomely large, like a giant wheeled mammoth or something. I think I would have liked for it to have fangs or claws or something.
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We were doing “Word Wars” during the NaNo write-in the other day, which is where you challenge another writer or writers to write as quickly as possible for a determined period of time. Each time I did a word war I wrote my original word count on my cup, and then when I was done I did the math, subtracting from the old total to get the number of words added. As you can see, I did a number of word wars. This is how one gets two thousand words written in an hour – a series of ten-minute and five-minute sprints.
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Got together with some of my WriMo friends today for a write-in. We had a good group. I think all told we had about a dozen people show up throughout the afternoon. Many words written at those tables that day!
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On my way to work this morning and got held up by some kind of construction…which actually turned out to be that there was some sort of massive water leak below the surface of the street, and it seemed to have pushed the surface of the road up a good six inches! If you look around the guy’s feet, you can see water bubbling up from underneath the cracks in the asphalt. Craziness. It was fixed the next day.
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I was all set to do another post on NaNo tonight, and on my way back home from the coffee shop I spied this ’58 Impala just hangin’ out in an alley. It was dark, I had no tripod, and it came out just a *wee* bit shaky, but I posted it anyway, because it’s just so damn cool. You should expect this sort of behavior from me by now, I imagine.