The OfBob team blog has been neglected for the past year. Not to say that shenanigans haven’t taken place, but no “official Shenanigans Club Meetings,” not sure what really would have made them official though. I think just us tweeting or blogging and labeling it as shenanigans. Christian and Sheridan have been busy with their t-shirt business 10EastRead and I’ve been mapping all over the place. We’ve been meeting more regularly in this November though because, a group of friends has been participating in National Novel Writing Month otherwise known a NaMoWriMo. This has included xiann, sheribomb and myself. The goal is to write 50,000 words in a month of “literary abandon.” I’ve done terrible in my abandon this year. Basically meaning I hadn’t written anything on my novel since the first week. I have however been pretty productive writing in my blog and other places while procrastinating on novel writing. A very similar thing happened last year, I had a surge of productivity in everything that was not novel writing. Embarrassingly though this year I’ve only written about 3,000 words where as last year I at least made it to 10,000.
Tonight we are having a write-in at the Soundry in Vienna. Basically we get together and write, giggle and drink too much coffee. This always makes me a bit nostalgic because we’ve been actually doing things like this for the past 18 or so years. Key is keeping somewhat on task, which means limiting at least a portion of the giggling.
One of the ways to increase productivity is by having “Write or Die” sessions. Write or Die is a simple website that has your word count and a timer. We decide ahead of time how many words we are going to write and what the time period is. Clicking go all at the same time we then start feverishly typing away. If you stop typing the page for Write or Die goes from white to pink to red. There is also a mode where it starts making terrible noises but none of us do that mode. The suicide mode actually has the select grayed out so we don’t know what that even entails and nobody has survived it to tell us about it.
Instead of writing a story I’ve been writing blog posts tonight. Look for some of them to come out over the next week or two on my geonerd blog “MapLoser.” I’m going to do editing before I actually post them there, there are is also one that I may consider too ranty to publish. Some people have been known to say things like “I wonder how many of these NaNoWriMo novels are just one long rant composed over an entire month.” It is easier to get out a bunch of words by ranting. Well, or typing etc, over and over and over again (oops sorry folks I was totally slipping into cheating for a moment there (oh wait I’m doing it again)). Anyway in the case of this writing on OfBob I’m posting the blog post as is. If you’ve gotten this fair in reading my crazy stream of consciousness I’m sorry, really really really sorry (oops, totally cheating again, I can’t believe you’ve gotten this far). The only changes are adding links which I looked up immediately. Everyone else is working on either novels, drawings or collections of short stories. I’ve heard references to chick-lit, dragon slaying and enjoying making everything go wrong. We’ve also taken time to view the necrophilia article on Wikipedia and laugh about how Jimmy Wales face appears over it and looks at it you while you read it right now. Whether or not you ever see the results of some of the other participants in “Write or Die,” is up to you though I have heard things such as “I’m not deleting any words until December.” So if the literary works do come out I expect they will be edited with slightly less abandon than they were written.
Our next official write-in is this coming Monday, once again at the Soundry in Vienna. It is a cute little workshop where artists come to work on projects. There is plentiful coffee and wifi, so come join us if you don’t mind a bit of giggling interspersed with periods of head down writing. There is also at the moment lots of cool robot artwork, including a crazy 3-D hand wearing a computer chip embedded in it which has some biostatistics and latitude and longitude on it. We’ve had people we didn’t directly know join us which has been fun.
Today and last week we had an interested combination of ourselves and high achieving high-school students. What is funny is NaNoWriMo is exactly the sort of thing our crew would have done in highschool, though we probably wouldn’t have said things like “I have to go home an finish a class project.” Fortunately “the Bastard Children of Bob,” as this blog is named after all turned out okay anyway. Anyway if you made it with me all the way this far wow! It doesn’t look like I’m quite going to make the goal of 1,000 words in 20 minutes but I at least came pretty darn close.