I’ve done Nanowrimo twice before – once I finished; the second time I got about 3000 words in and then gave up because life got in the way. Richard’s done it almost every year since 2001, and every year we’ve donated money to the cause. But this year we decided to aim a little bit higher, and try to raise enough money to attend the Night of Writing Dangerously. Last weekend we finally hit our goal ($300 – the minimum needed so we could both attend), and we’ve been looking forward to tonight ever since.

Richard’s co-municipal liason for the region drove down to our house, and then the three of us continued on to Davis to pick up another Nanowriter, and then off we set for San Francisco. We gave ourselves plenty of time because even though it was a Sunday afternoon, you can never be sure what you will encounter on the freeway between here and the Bay Area. If you allot out only about the amount of time it *should* take to drive, you will inevitably hit traffic / accident / rush hour / something, and be late. If you give yourself lots of extra time, it will be smooth sailing all the way, and you will be early. Naturally, since we gave ourselves nearly an hour to spare, we didn’t hit a single snag. Heck, we even found street parking less than 3 blocks away from the venue, which is pretty unheard of for San Francisco. It felt a little silly to be there so early, but it turned out to have been worth it; as we were leaving later we talked to a couple who’d left Sacramento just a little after us, and didn’t make it down until two hours after the event started.

Luckily there was a nice, comfy lobby for us to lurk in until the doors opened, and as it turned out, we weren’t the only ones who had erred on the side of caution for driving time, so there was quite a crowd gathered by the time 5pm rolled around and they finally opened the doors and let us all go inside.

The six-hour long event was an absolute blast. There were about 200 people all clustered around tables, typing furiously away on laptops. Every once in a while someone would go up to the front to ring a giant bell, indicating that they’d just reached their 50,000 word goal (one of those was the other ML for our region). They had word sprints where people tried to see how many words they could crank out in a set amount of time. Chris Baty (the guy who started the whole Nanowrimo thing in the first place) gave a talk. They had a room in the back where you could have your ‘author picture’ taken (Richard wore a Viking helmet for his. I did not). There was food and drink galore – a candy buffet to start us off, a full dinner, and then later on someone showed up with a mountain of pizza and a massive amount of crazy, giant donuts. Since this was a thing for writers, there was plenty of coffee and soda and anything else people wanted to drink. They had even set up free WiFi for us, which came in extra handy because I’m doing my novel in Google docs, which is all online.

The six hours flew by, and admittedly I did not manage to do as much writing as I did yesterday. But all I wanted to do was get a little ahead of the game, and I did. I’m not sure we’ll be able to do this every year (since I know Richard will keep on doing Nano, and I think maybe I’ll try it again next year too), but I’m really glad that we had a chance to do this at least once.

Nanowrimo update: 37,565 words, which means that not only am I ever so slightly *ahead* of the game for the next, oh, four minutes (until tomorrow hits), but that with all the coffee shop hopping we did yesterday, I managed to crank out about 11,400 words in the course of two days, and all on the laptop. Only one teensy side to all that crazy writing for the weekend: hello there, wrist pain, we meet again!