The Wrimo Report

"After six prescription pain killers (the suggested limit for the entire day), my hands felt numb enough to type."

NaNo 2009 started off strong for me. I'd do most of my writing on the weekends and then work a job and a half during the week. I figured the hardest part of my month was going to be organizing the weekly meetings, as 2009 was my first year as a Municipal Liaison in a region

"Thank God for the crazy people I call friends!"

On top of my already-piled plate at NaNo's start (all the possible Honors classes, four choirs, three different bands, learning a new instrument, breaking my ankle, getting a chest infection, and the wonderful people that remained my friends through all this madness), I had a much more pressing issue to deal with. In October, one of my

"...I realized that I wasn't a sick and dying man writing a story, I was a writer of stories who was dealing with a sickness."

Goodness how long ago did this adventure start for me...

I remember so many years ago that I found nanowrimo.org and thought what a wonderful idea it was. But for two years or more I'd always forget about it

"In July, it didn't seem like such a daunting task. In October, I was hyperventilating."

Over the summer, my current roommate and I exchanged emails about our plans for the upcoming semester (i.e. who was going to bring a rug and do we need a mini fridge for our late night Coke binges or is the fridge in the kitchen going to be enough?). I mentioned that I was interested in participating in

"I heard the boom of a 2,000-word wall crash to the ground."

With rutabagas and crispy shallots dancing through my head, I scribbled furiously through the last two-thousand words of my first NaNo novel while watching the nine hundredth hour of the The Food Network Thanksgiving marathon. Soon, I too, would be sitting down to a delicious turkey feast, my NaNo experience, a sweet and

"I wanted a novel by the end of the month, so darn the side effects, I was going to get one!"

To Do List:

-Keep up with seven high school classes
-Prepare for midterms and take end-of-semester tests
-Sleep
-Oh yes... Write a novel

"The concept of total public humiliation was the best motivator I've ever met."

This year my strategy was personal public humiliation if I failed. Literally. I told everyone I met what I was doing for November 2009: writing a novel, a fifty-thousand word novel. Some were astounded at the undertaking; some laughed. For me, it was telling people and knowing they were going to be asking for updates, and the fact that if I failed to complete it, everyone would know of my failure and they would have

"I spent most of Thanksgiving week and the day itself blowing my nose and running a fever and typing."

I spent the first six days of NaNoWriMo in Italy, without computer or internet access. The nine-hour time difference meant I could start at 9 AM on the first of November, Rome time, so with pen and notebook, I began my novel at the front of St. Peter's Basilica just before going in for Mass (see picture). For the rest of that

"The act of creatively inserting a random garden shovel, and the crazy woman driver who swerves to miss it, forced me to swerve as well. "

I’ve had a story kicking around in my head for a couple of years and decided this year I was going to put it on paper. I signed up with NaNoWriMo on October 31 and started writing the next night. I quickly discovered it was one thing to have an idea, but quite another to get

"I prefer to think of it as my first out-of-body experience—and yes, it will go into a future novel."

On Friday the 13th of November 2009, I decided that with almost 30,000 words on my green bar, I could afford to join friends to celebrate their two-year-old daughter’s birthday. The event took place at a Serbian Orthodox Church, which also was holding its annual fund raising dinner dance. The church’s priest, Father