It was a dark and windy night....

well the first day is here and words have been written. I made an early start, at just after midnight last night. Yeah, before the first hour of November had passed I had a whole paragraph written. That's some dedication!

Look at that progress bar! Wow almost 1%!

I only got back into laptop reach after 12 last night because I had been to the Cambridge Nanowrimo kick off party last night. In amongst a pub filled with crazy Halloween costumed locals was a large group of even more crazily costumed NaNoWriMo participants. It appears to be custom to get as drunk as you can before going home and starting on a full length novel and trying to squeeze out a couple of thousand well chosen carefully positioned words. But it was good to get caught up in the atmosphere of fellow wriMos. And there was an official registration, with goodie bag handouts! The bags were full of motivational quotations, official stickers, and chocolate supplies( we have to keep our brains fueled somehow and we may not have time for cooking - let alone shopping). There are even several pages of word search puzzles which I assume are supposed to be less of a distraction thig and more to help give your brain something to do while it tries to puzzle its' way out of the plot deadend you just wrote yourself into.

We also had to present story setting, main protagonist name, title and genre, and a large number of important plot elements- like how many vampires or guns there are supposed to be. I had to walk around with a lot of blank spaces on my form and my title was simply: Untitled. What was worse wriMos, wrimos who have done this thing before, (o.K to be clear we are talking about pros here) were all talking about the novel outline they had prepared. No one told me about the month of planning you were allowed; were expected to utilise to the full. No one told me - until last night, with raised eybrows and sympathetic smiles- just how important it was going to be. Oh, dear.

On the plus side, it was great to hear all the varied, sometimes astounding, ideas out there and mingle with Other People Like Me.

Besides all is not lost: I have had this character in my head long enough, and I know whhere he is going, and I know where the action will take place(mostly), and I know what the last sentence will be. Now I just need to see if I can pull a decent narrative out from somewhere and wrap it all up.

Now to make the most of the weekend's many unbooked hours.