Rebekah & me at our midnight write-in kickoff at Denny's for NaNoWriMo 2009.
My username on NaNoWriMo: yksin.
The new name for November: NaNovember. For the entire month is devoted, amongst a certain set of crazed writers, to writing something that we will pass off as a “novel” of some 50,000 words, all in 30 days. That averages to about 1,667 words a day, about 6 double-spaced pages.
A bunch of us Anchorage NaNo’ers assembled at the Denny’s at Denali & Northern Lights beginning about 10:30 PM & got in a bit of socializing or, in my case, coffee fortification before the stroke of midnight set our fingers tapping on laptops, typewriter, or whatever the dedicated wordprocessing gizmo is that Rebekah uses. A little later we had a writing break, which turned into a photoshoot of those of us who were in Halloween costume. Then people began to get tuckered out & departed. Rebekah & I were last to leave, around 2:00 AM — but I was determined to at least get my daily quota in before I hit the sack &, having the bad habit of editing as I write (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but tends to be a liability when you want high word production, as is the case with NaNo), that took me till around 5:00 AM. Well, & I was a bit over quota too, at 2,138 words, which is nice. And then I slept in. (Wrote later in the evening, and ended the first day at 2,653 words. Only 47,347 more to go!)
I’m calling this year’s NaNovel Long Dark, which isn’t likely to be a novel — more like a set of stories or vignettes from earlier in the timeline of the same story universe that “Cold” is set in. Right now I’m writing about the first trip to Earth of a data trader, who somehow appeared in my imagination a couple of weeks ago. She’s a member of, and agent for, the Consensus, which is the society of people who live in the asteroid belts & on some of the moons of the gas giants of our solar system — the same people who will send out the ships that ultimately colonize the binary system where the planet Boleyn & Bai (of “Cold”) will be terraformed. It’s the rich resources of the “Persian Gulf of outer space” — especially helium-3, which will be a major energy source using fusion — that will ultimately finance voyages to other star systems. My data trader, whose name at the moment is Louava, is riding down a space elevator from orbit & staring in fascination at everything she sees. And, it turns out, remembering in quite some detail some of the training she & other data traders & diplomats got from a past spy & data thief whose name somehow became Mordecai. I never heard of this guy before last night.
NaNo writing is so weird.
Here’s my tweets for the day:
- 2138 words for NaNoWriMo thus far — 471 over the daily quota of 1667 average. Going to bed now, will write more upon rising. #
- The real reason for switching from daylight savings to standard time on Nov 1: to give NaNoers an extra hour to write today. #
- Blogged at Henkimaa: Crossed Genres announces its first short story anthology — and “Cold” will be in it! http://bit.ly/mmcRe #lgbt #
Several of our number came in Hallowe’en costume, & we got pics during a writing break. Here’s the slideshow. Dr. Horrible, eat your heart out!
