Write In

Yesterday was Seattle's halfway point for Nanowrimo (said point being either the 15th or the 16th of the month as one prefers, though there is some contention as to the day; it's like a much less important version of the debate about Easter.) As per every year, there's a big get together in some place with a lot of space and some coffee, and a bunch of people show up with their laptops and peck away at the novels while being surrounded by their fellows, occasionally engaging in sprints (type as much as you can in a short period) or word wars (challenge a neighbor to write more in a generally slightly longer period than a sprint). There are prize drawings that you usually enter by achieving some number of words, for instance, one ticket per thousand words written.
I've never actually gone to a write in at all; most of them are smaller versions of the halfway get-together, with six or eight people in a cafe somewhere on Wednesday night for two hours. But the atmosphere was incredibly conducive to writing, and even though I was only on site for an hour, and some of that was spent getting set up and buying a beer and so on, I put up 2000 words on the WiP. (A caveat to that: I thought I wrote 2500 words; I'm writing the book on Google Drive, but had to port it to Open Office, and they count words so differently that I ended up with an extra 500 in Open Office. So that's what I wrote down, that I'd done 2500, but the extra 500 were scattered throughout my 35000 word document, so they didn't actually count. I felt bad about faking my honor system number unintentionally, even though I claimed no raffle tickets at all, so it didn't matter. I am built for guilt.)
The point being, it was pretty fun, and I think I might trek out and find more of them in the next couple of weeks, see if the feeling stands, and if I can crank out such big numbers so quickly which I'm not often able to do on my own.
(I was also able to donate a couple copies of Engines to serve as prizes, which were well received, and which was a relief, as I'm looking at the box full of them and wondering what will happen with them all, and coming up blank.)

NaNoWriMo

As seemingly every year, I am doing National Novel Writing Month. This year, it's a rewrite: I had a novel that went over somewhat like a lead balloon, and I'm fixing it (by which I mean: burning it to the ground and rebuilding by memory of the original plans, with sudden inspirations that have no basis in the first version; all to the good.) Progress is good, very good indeed, and I'm feeling like the story is so much improved that it's amazing. Though, it's not quite the same story, and I'm not even sure it will end up the same genre when it's done. But it's a better thing overall, so that's good.

Reading success!

It went very well. And as it turns out, there was book cake. Which is it's own success.

The Big Day

Today is the day. The culmination of roughly two years of negotiating, editing, waiting, rewriting, waiting, planning, waiting, thinking, waiting, and waiting. Today is the day you can go out into the world and buy Engines of the Broken World. It's been a long time coming, but I'm very happy with the end result.

Also today: I'll be working a shift at the kid's desk at the University Book Store's main branch in Seattle, from 10-4. Not my first time at that particular rodeo, but I don't normally spend much time in the kid's department, so this will be...interesting.

And then tonight, at 7 pm, I'll be doing a reading at that very same store, not more than 50 feet from where I will have previously been badly recommending books.