As the last hours of National Novel Writing Month tick down, I, thankfully, can sit back and watch them pass without a care in the world. I am, of course, cheering on the few friends and fellow NaNoBoston Wrimos who are typing as fast as their fingers will let them to try and cram in a truly remarkable amount of words before the midnight deadline hits. However, I do this from the comfort of my office chair, sipping on a latte, and pretending to be a real person again.
So how did I do? Well, if you look at my NaNo profile, my NaNo Stats will show that this month was a bit of a roller coaster. Unlike Tom, whose stat graph is something most scientists only dream of when plotting experimental data over time, mine has definite peaks and valleys. There are days when I surged ahead valiantly, only to fall in to languor or have life step in the way. I’ll make no excuses, but merely hope that managing to win a bit early compensates for the days of lackluster performance.
I owe that win to Anna (also known as Swiss Anna, crazy Anna, or her username bandanna, so as not to be confused with our wonderful ML Anna, also know as QueenOfTheUniverse) who decided that we should all be a little crazier than usual and try to do a 24 hour writing marathon. I’ll admit here that even in this I was a bit languid, sauntering in at a very reasonable 11am after a full nights sleep, instead of the dark and dreary 6am when it started. However, I did stay through to 6am the following morning, so I hope that counts for something.
This mighty endeavor ended up propelling five of us to victory, as we stumbled across the 50k mark sleep deprived and delrious. How delirious, you ask. Well, I’ll refer you to the Twitter account we set up to help people keep track of where we were. Read through it and I think you’ll see what I mean. My own twitter account from that time brings this little gem:
Holy shit it’s 4am and I’m in Roxbury. What the fuck has NaNoWriMo done to me?
I’m sure I’ll have more stories to tell once I’ve recovered from the month a bit further, and once we’ve officially concluded it with the Thank God It’s Over party this coming Sunday. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with some excerpts from my Twitter account this month. I decided that I would post my word count and a quote of the day every day. I fell well short of that, but here’s a full list of all those quotes and the day they were posted on, in case you missed them. Note that a “Day of Fail” does not necessarily denote that I did not write anything, but simply that I did not post a quote for that day.
- “I piss excellence, damnit.”
- “He had the urge to hug this man and break his face in with a shoe all at once.”
- “You are, in fact, being sodomized so hard by reality that you cannot even begin to understand this fact for the sheer sensory overload of the experience.”
- “Then he exploded.”
- “Mike reflexively grabbed his ass, and his hand came up bloody.”
- Day Of Fail
- “Well what the fuck are you going to have me go and do next? Dip my balls in acid and see what happens?”
- “Oh, it’s the roof.” “The roof,” Mike asked. “Yeah, the roof is on fire.”
- “Ah tequila, that horrible brown liquid.”
- Day Of Fail
- Day Of Fail
- Day Of Fail
- “It’s the language of the world, Mike. It’s the primal scream of every living thing on the planet.”
- “As if the timing was commanded by God himself, Walter reappeared carrying three well worn machetes.”
- “Kill a fucking demon? Are you completely mental?”
- “Really, if life was going to be completely nonsensical, it should at least do it with some panache.”
- “Sitting in them, Mike decided, felt just a tiny bit worse than getting caught face first in barbed wire.”
- Day Of Fail
- “I… did you just burn all of that?” “Yes.” “Six hours of writing…” “Yes, now moving on…”
- Day Of Fail
- Day Of Fail
- Day Of Fail
- “Luckily for Mike, that sensation was short lived as he was viciously electrocuted in front of a live audience.”
- “As his chest rose and fell for the last time, his cane fell and shattered on the hard pavement.”
- “Yes, and if I’m up on my culture, it appeared to be the hooded visage of death, as imagined by Walt Disney.”
- Day Of Fail
- Day Of Fail
- Day Of Fail
- Day Of Victory!
- Day Of Sweet Joy and Relaxation!
Ciao,
– B
Extant Musings 
Leave a Reply