Hackbus: a traveling assemblage of amateur writers

This November I was a "winner" in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, for those of you that haven't yet been nagged by SarahJanet to join). The basic idea of NaNo is that people are always saying they'd like to write a novel 'someday'. Wrimos (not to be confused with Winos, although similarities are evident) say, "why not today?" and then proceed to write a minimum of 50,000 words in 30 days while juggling careers and family and schoolwork and weddings and illnesses and life and friends and possibly geese. (Yes, some people juggle geese. Baby geese, they were juggled; which kind of makes this project seem a bit less insane.)

In some ways Nano was way more difficult than I expected. I discovered 20,000 words into my novel that I only had enough plot planned for roughly 25,000 words. This is when I started expanding, embellishing and adding plot twists with the result that now at 50, 853 words, my little-novel-that-could is only roughly two thirds complete.

I also became dreadfully ill on November 7 th, so sick in fact that I wasn't sure that I would personally finish the month of November, let alone finish a novel by then. I had several days where I couldn't even sit up, let alone look at a computer screen (I really should have gone to the hospital, plus there are usually interesting people to write about after a hospital visit). By this point I was roughly six thousand words behind, and falling. After missing two weeks of work, losing 18 pounds, having a series of tests that told me nothing, and taking the world's scariest antibiotics (possible side effects included: tendon rupture, and mental and mood changes) I made a comeback and crossed the NaNo finish line at roughly 11:30 on November 30th.

This past Sunday we had our Thank God It's Over party. We played Cranium and Harry Potter Trivia and Balderdash (see Hackbus, above) and pool (badly). We karaoked (also badly) and read novel excerpts and ate and blew colorful conical noise makers as each of the winners received their mini-trophies. In summary, we were geeks in a geeky setting allowing ourselves to be as geeky as we possibly could.

I'm an introvert by nature and not exactly a social butterfly, but I did okay. I played some pool (badly) with people I didn't know and chatted and sang karaoke and thoroughly chickened out of reading my excerpt.

It turns out that we Wrimos were a Hackbus, a traveling assemblage of amateur writers. We wrote in coffee shops and libraries, on campus and on the bus, on the couch and in bed, we even caught someone jotting notes while driving (please note that neither NaNoWriMo nor I recommend this as a way of getting your daily word count.) Even when I wasn't writing I was thinking about writing: at work, in the shower, on the bus, in medical waiting rooms and while waiting to fall asleep at night. I'd be almost asleep and suddenly a character would wind up and give me a swift kick in the seat of the brain and I'd have to hop up and scribble down a few notes.

I won't ever say that I'm good, but there were occasions that I took genuine delight in the words that poured out of me. I made myself laugh out loud on occasion, which caused me to get many odd and a few alarmed looks. NaNo's focus on quantity, not quality, took the pressure off and allowed me to try. I haven't taken an English class in over 10 years. I don't know what a gerund is or why I spell things the way I do or what the elements of style are. I'm sure my grammar is purely abysmal. For one month though, I got to be the storyteller, the novellist, without worrying about all of that.

I guess now I can say that I'm a writer. I have a "winner" certificate to prove it.