NaNoWriMo

And here we are:  the super heros of writing, the official contestants of National Novel Writing Month -  the 30 day race to write 50,000 words,  the crazy Miss Delicious and me. 

I was dragged into doing this because because Golden Delicious is writing a book for her senior project and she says she needs a support system.  I thought it sounded moderately easy, how hard can writing a book be, right???  But now we are on our second week and things are getting a bit dicey.  

We did have a hilarious time last Saturday, though.  We decided to go to an official "write-in" at the Villa Coffee House.  We were a bit nervous, having never done something like this.  We parked several blocks away and as we were walking towards the shop we saw a tall, greasy, slightly overweight young man clutching a lap top computer in front of us. 

"What do you want to bet he is going to the write-in too??"

"No!"  

"Yes!"

He walked in the door in front of us.  G.D. and I scurried to the back and hid in a corner to observe... and we can now report that everything you have ever heard about authors being strange is...

ABSOLUTELY TRUE!!

All the authors were seated at one long table.  There was an enormous man with a vintage star wars shirt on with a straggly red beard, our previous greasy fellow, and lots and lots of larger ladies with uncombed hair pulled back in severe looking buns.  We overheard random snatches of conversation such as, "I totally agree, Johnny Depp is the most overcast actor of our generation."  and "Perhaps a small story will illustrate the point I'm trying to make..."

Golden Delicious and I ordered our hot chocolate and decided we'd stay for one hour.  We forced ourselves to work, slavishly writing down lots of words, while the rest of them talked and laughed.  We later found out they spend the first hour socializing and then get to work, but by that point we were already done and headed for free bread and a peanut butter bar at Great Harvest.

We did have a very nice conversation with the "master coordinator" for our area.  She was helpful and super friendly (she didn't think we were with nanowrimo at first because we were hiding) but she gave us all sorts of hand outs and stickers based on the super hero theme for this year.  Our favorites are the Zorro masks which we wished we had gotten several days earlier for Halloween, and which she told us we should put on "whenever we were stuck because they are magic and will help you write."

Fantastic!!

I do not think they work though,  and I am writing this blog post instead of my 1,667 words that I need to do today for my future best seller novel. Actually, it's all complete rubbish.  But the whole motivational tone of nanowrimo can be summed up like this:

"Of course what you're writing is terrible.  Of course it's awful.  Press ON!  Keep writing!" 

and so we are.