TEDWRD

I wanted to say thank you very much for sponsoring me to the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) "Night of Writing Dangerously". It was a wonderful event, in a beautiful venue, and met a lot of really good people, including Chris Baty, the guy who started this whole thing. He wrote the book "No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days". He hung out at our table for a while and signed my book.

 Chris Baty, founder of NaNoWriMoI have a confession to make. Going into the event last night, I was very behind in my word count. The idea is to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. That averages to 1667 words per day. If I kept up with writing that many words a day, I should have already written 35,007 before the event. I was a little over 28,000.

The theme for the night (which had nothing to do with your novel), was "Noir" (like Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep), so I dressed up in khakis a dress shirt with my best art deco tie, and my trench coat. I looked like Indiana Jones doing his best Humphrey Bogart impression. It was at the Julia Morgan Ballroom in the Merchant Exchange building. I had an errand to run in San Francisco, and arrived to the event a half an hour late, which is to say at 5:30 PM. Not that big a deal, most people were just settling in, getting a drink from the bar, or finding a power strip to plug their laptop into. I found an empty chair at a table next to the podium, and set up to write.

They had a lot of food. There was a table in the middle of the room full of all sorts of candy, which I did my best to avoid. I've lost 19 pounds in 7 weeks and I want to keep it off. There was a coffee cart which I frequented several times, and they served dinner: a tortellini dish which I totally missed out on. There wasn't enough to go around so pizza was ordered. Later, they were catered by a donut company called Psycho Donuts which specializes in strange combinations. I had an apricot fritter, and brought home a green tea and dark chocolate.

There was a professional photographer on site taking your "author photo", the picture to put on the back of your novel. When that was announced I went there, and was in the front of the line. I thought I was smart, but everyone else went for the food. I should have known. I got pizza and was happy, so all's well.

There were a few contests during the evening, and a quick talk by Chris Baty, the founder. The held "word wars" which is a timed contest to see who writes the most words in the time allotted. The first was a 5 minute word war, then they went up to 10, 20, & finally 30 minutes. No one at our table won any of these. Then they had a contest for the table who wrote the most amount of words at the halfway point, and then at the end of the evening.

Our table won both.

In fact 3 people out of the five sitting at our table reached 50,000 during the evening a full week ahead of schedule.

So, "how did TEDWRD do?", you may be asking yourself. I was about 7,000 words behind when I got to the event. I ended up with a word count of 38,564 not only catching me up, but putting me ahead of schedule. I averaged over 2,000 words per hour in the 5 and half hours I was there. They may not be the best words Ive ever written, and this needs some serious editing when I'm done (that's a story for another day), but I'm very happy with my word count.

Some pics: