What can be better than getting together with a couple of your writer friends and challenging yourselves to see how many words you can write in twenty to thirty minutes? The friendly laughter and talk in-between I guess.
Last evening and into midnight, I joined a couple friends who are also participating in NaNoWriMo for some fun, food, hot chocolate, and story writing. One friend is working on a contemporary story focusing on a character with a limiting eye condition. (The character’s not blind, but she has a form of tunnel vision that I think would make her legally blind? There are medical terms for it but I can’t remember them.) The other friend is working on a story that originally was going to be a small town story similar to the Mitford series, but a Victorian bookstore surprised her by taking a fantasy twist. (We were kinda laughing about it because my friend isn’t big into fantasy, so she’s blaming my influence on the turn her story has taken.)
The start of the night was kinda crazy cause we had planned on Dominos’s pizza, but the local shop was super busy. So we went with another place. (Nothing against Dominos. I think they’re awesome with friendly service I believe to be on par with friendly Chick-fi-la. It was just it was past supper time and we were getting hungry. Anyway–) We got a hot chocolate crockpot recipe we’d found on Facebook started, then settled down where we wished to start writing. We shared what we were working on and possible goals for our stories. Then we started trying to beat the clock.
Of course there were breaks for food and good talk. The hot chocolate was good if a touch more bitter than what we were used to. One friend had to leave before midnight to get home to her family. So my second friend and I wrote until just a few minutes before midnight when we posted our word counts into the official NaNo site. We then closed the night with some cleanup and conversation. (Well, the conversation was more me rambling about half a dozen or more tangents somehow related to Tolkien.<insert embarrassed face>)
All in all, it was an awesome night. I am about three hundred words shy of twenty thousand. My borrowed character has gotten through pre-Hobbit and Hobbit stages and is in the middle of one of the early stories of the Mellon Chronicles. I’m focusing on the fifty thousand word goal and if I manage to reach that about halfway through (kinda like I did last year, though it was the later half of the month) I’d like to see if I can reach one hundred thousand. I’m curious about where those word counts will get me. All I currently know is that with how the story is going so far, I kinda doubt that I’m going to reach the Fellowship point in the timeline by fifty thousand. Or who knows, maybe my story will surprise me. Which means I should probably get back to reading my copy of the book because the hobbits have only just met Strider and my focus in my version of Strider’s character.
Well, there is where I’m currently at in my NaNoWriMo journey. Since I have my crazy work schedule Saturday next week, I’ll have to see what I can whip up. Or maybe I’ll end up skipping that week. I don’t know. We’ll see.
Hope you enjoyed. Bye.
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