Today is the first day of MoWiTy (Monkeys with Type Writers), which is the continuation of the write-ins from NanoWrimo at The Soundry in Vienna. Once November was over we didn’t want to stop writing though the group needed a new name. Today was our biggest group yet with a total of 13 people. A combination of activies are going on, not all directly novel writing related. Some people are working on cartoons, another is coding and everyone else is writing something. In my case I’m working on blog posts, including this one. The last time I attended a write-in I had not worked on my novel in weeks so I did blogs then as well. It was really helpful to work on a serious of blog posts for a couple hours and then just have to go back and edit them to publish.
One of our traditions of the write-ins is doing word sprints with this website Write or Die (which appears to have gotten its own domain now). Everyone agrees on a number of words and a length of time and the goal is to write that many words. You event this information into the Write or Die website and press “go.” The next page features a large text box on a basically blank screen. If you don’t keep typing the page turns darker and darker shades of pink/red. One way of cheating and making the red go away is buy typing and space and then quickly deleting it. Some of us have a hard time not doing this for some reason the changing of the screen colors freaks us all out a bit. In the case of this particular sprint we are aiming for 400 words in ten minutes. We’ll see if I make it.
If you are interested in joining our group it is every Monday from 7pm-11pm at the Soundry (address here). We are a really informal group, people mostly work on their own projects and only occasionally discuss what they’re writing. This may be different than other writing groups, but I’m not sure since I’ve actually never belonged to another writing group. As the group grows I’m sure the structure will change depending on the will of the group. Since we are informal though this format is adjustable and if people want to share what they are writing there is no reason they can’t do that with others who want to participate.