Night of Writing Dangerously

Every year NaNoWriMo hosts the Night of Writing Dangerously in San Francisco. (http://www.gifttool.com/athon/AthonDetails?ID=1891&AID=806) I dream of going one year in the not too distant future. This year St. Louis decided to host its own NoWD on the same day and time (well, ours was a few hours earlier to make up for the time zone difference.) Sunday night, we invaded MoKaBe's and took up over half of the upper level, consumed vast amounts of coffee, and wrote copious amounts of words. Well, some us wrote copious amounts of words. I hear others didn't write much at all and instead spent 6 hours socializing. I socialized, but also wrote 4112 words while I was there. This was on Ravaged Heart.

Our fabulous Municipal Liaison decided to make this a fund-raising event, but the donation was optional this year. We raised $121 Sunday night alone! How exciting is that?!


So why should you donate to NaNoWriMo? Why is it important to a bunch of crazy adults? Well, it's a non-profit organization. And the people who run it need to pay to keep the website up and running, and the electricity in their offices, and some of them even like to eat and pay rent. But to me, even more important than support us crazy adults who give a month of our lives each year to noveling, is to support the kids who do it. There's a Young Writer's Program (http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/ywp) that encourages kids to write, and NaNoWriMo donates goodies to the classrooms that sign up for this. And, writers are also readers, so it indirectly encourages kids to read as well as right. That in and of itself is a very worthy cause to donate to.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.


So, lots of fun was had by all. I realized, however, that I need to reread Ravaged Heart and make lots of notes in the process. There are parts I inadvertently skipped, and I think I started the novel far too late in the story time line. Where I am now, at somewhere around 50,000 words, is much closer to the end than another 40,000 words will allow me to be. So I need to start sooner, fill in some key plot points I missed. Reading and making notes will make that so much easier to do. So that will be my task for this week.

For all you NaNoers who haven't reached 50K yet, keep going! One more week. I know you can do it! For those of you who have reached 50K, congratulations! One more day until we can validate and get our purple bars. (How perfect is it that winners' word count bar turns purple once they're validated?) And for the rest of you who just think I'm insane for this, well, thanks for following me on my journey. I didn't reach my goal of 100K, but I'm starting to come to terms with that. I have words written - perhaps some will even be salvageable - and I have research done that will help on another novel that is in the early stages. A novel I get to be a collaborator on. Very exciting, yes? Yes. This one will be a side project, as I'm going to focus on a final round of edits for Divided Heart, sending out more query letters to find my agent, and finishing up Ravaged Heart. (Is that all?) But it will be there nonetheless.

What's that? You want to know what this collaborative effort is? A few days ago John came to me with an idea for a novel. Keep in mind I hadn't told him anything about my NaNovel, just that I was doing NaNo. So when he told me his idea, and asked if I'd help write it, I was surprised that it was about half of what I was trying to do with NaNo. He's writing it, but I'll help with research, ideas, editing, finessing. It should be a blast.

Oh yes, there's also the little matter of writing more poems and essays for the second volume of In the Moment (release date TBD...we need content first). So my writing plate is very, very full. I need to clone myself so I can send my clone to my day job, while I spend all day writing and editing.