Our Group

2010 brought an interesting new development in the lives of several people who participated in Nanowrimo.  Wait...you don't know what Nanowrimo is?  Go flog yourself....do it! I suppose I should begin there.

Nanowrimo stands for National Novel Writing Month and was brought to us by Chris Baty and his merry men of writers.  Have you ever told yourself that one day you will write that great novel that's been stuck in your head, but you can't quite get it down because life keeps kicking you around?  The idea was to write 50,000 words in the 30 days of November to get that first step done for us writers who...well, might be a bit of a procrastinator.  I'm sure it started small enough but now it's a big deal to a lot of writers.  You can find out a whole bunch more at their site www.nanowrimo.org. 

I have been trying to accomplish this feat for five years, and 2010 was the magical year.  There were a couple factors that made me win for the first time ever.  First, my vacation was shot all to hell so there were no traveling plans in my month.  Second, and more importantly, there was a change in the way this challenge was handled for our area. The chat room allowed most of us nerdy, fearful, antisocial writers to interact immediately with other creatures like ourselves without the terror of looking each other in the eye.  But looking each other in the eye is what we ended up doing.  Opening up and being silly online made us crave more personal interactions, and we started going to write ins (designated dates and times where a bunch of writers get together to talk and write and push each other forward in our challenge).  This resulted in more talking and more meetings and soon we acted like humans. *Gasp*  Yes, it was amazing. 

These interactions and these friendships I was developing were having a major impact on my progress.  Needless to say, I won.  Five years later and I finally wrote 50K in 30 days.  I nearly cried, the big sap I am.  Some of us were so impressed and excited about how motivated we were, that we didn't want it to stop.  Why should we stop talking and stop writing after November?  No reason.  So we developed Write On! with the plan to keep writing and keep socializing after November. 

Now what are we doing here blogging?  Why not?  Everyone is doing it, why can't we?  We figure we'll scream out to the world what we're accomplishing (or not accomplishing) and whatever BS we want to say.  It's an expressive internet world, and we're just trying to find our space.

Jennifer