NaNoWriMo? We Laugh at NaNoWriMo…

For the second time since starting the new bloggery regime, I’m writing a post in real time. This time, at least, I did it on purpose.

As I write this I’m bunkered down in the QWC office with a team of twenty other writers, all of them ferociously typing away in an attempt to write 30,000 words in the space of two and a half days. We call this madness the Rabbit Hole – the third that the QWC has run – and this time around it’s being run in several locations around Australia.

This my second bite of the cherry for the Rabbit Hole. The first time around I was a newly hired employee of the QWC who signed up ’cause it seemed like a good way to generate some work. I showed up and worked exclusively on Fritz the Laptop, who routinely objected to such tasks as “playing music” and “running word” and generally “working for longer than two hours before restarting.”

This time around I’m working on Shifty Silas, the laptop I picked up after a fourteen-hour stretch in Rockhampton airport convinced me that Fritz was on his last legs. Silas is the first laptop I’ve acquired since having, like, an actual job, so he’s considerably less buggy than Fritz was. He can actually sustain wireless access without crashing, for starters. And I can type this, listen to music, and run Scrivner in the background without him throwing a hissy fit (in Fritz’s defense, his problems weren’t all his fault; I did leave him running Vista for four straight years, after all).

We kicked off proceedings about fifteen minutes ago. I was supposed to say something inspiring to rally the team, but I’m generally not good at that, so I shared my favourite piece of writing advice that I acquired while reading Dean Wesley Smith’s blog.

You don’t have to write the whole thing, you just have to write the next 250 words.

There are days when I remember that. There are days when I don’t.

Lately there’s far more of the latter than the former, but I’m guessing three days of chasing a 30,000 word goal is going to remind me of just how easy writing can be when you set aside the angst and work.

In the interests of setting some hard targets, these are my goals for the weekend:

• Write two weeks of blog posts (weekends are my prime blogging times, and I’ll be at the Rabbit Hole this weekend and Continuum next weekend).
• Write the first draft of a short, short story.
• Knock over about 10,000 words on the Untitled Victorian Planetary Romance, Pt 1 draft.

Best I get on with it, yes? I’ll catch you all on the other side.