Double NANO rainbows!!!

Ok, I just read Noony's last post and naturally, I clicked where she told me to click because...baaa, right?

It's a good thing I just went to the bathroom, otherwise, I'd have moistened myself. Hyperbole and a Half is worth all the awesome in the internet.

Well, maybe not all of it because that would leave no room for NaNo (or YouTube videos of cats).

We all know that the idea is to cram 50K words into 30 days of writing. There are people who can do this. They're like...double rainbows. You know they're real because you see videos of them on the internet. They're not like unicorns because the internet pictures of unicorns look like this.

I'm so not going to win NaNo. I write slower than a bear with its tail stuck in the ice. No worries, though. I always end November with more words than I thought I would and I'll tell you why.

I love Write Ins.

Writers tend to be solitary by nature. When you're writing a story, it's really just about you and your computer, getting the words out of your brain before they start stinging like wasps. There's no room for anyone else in there because 3rd parties get in the way of the process.

But I'll tell you this. Hermits get weird. All the worlds in your brain start to take over and pretty soon, you're seeing cats riding fire-breathing unicorns through double rainbows all the time.

That's when it's time (ok, a little past time) for you to pack up your laptop and your power cord and haul yourself out to wherever your local NaNo Write In is being hosted. It'll be in a library, or a bookstore, or in a church basement, or at the student union of a local college. There will be coffee.

Most importantly, there will be people. (You should shower before you go. Hermits frequently begin to smell a little...funky.) People who are blinking at the bright lights the same way you are. People who, when you meet them, the first question they ask isn't "What do you do?" but "What are you writing?"

These are your people. Some of them have never done this before and they're afraid. Be nice to them. Some of them think they have all the answers. Obviously not, or they would be 'Hyperbole and a Half' - and they're not. But most of them are a lot like you. They write because it's what they do. NaNo may be the only time some of them give themselves permission to dig deeper into their writing.

But mostly, being around other people as they write sends this buzzing sort of energy into the air around them, and around you. And it starts humming and whirring and leaking into pores and crevices and the combined power of awesomeness in the room somehow ends up leaving folks with more energy than they came in with. Creativity is greater than the sum of its parts.

For more information on finding Write Ins in your area, register at the NaNo website (free!) and find your region by clicking on "My Region," then "Find a Region." That group should have lots of information on where to find official NaNo Write Ins, as well as a few informal ones.

Double rainbows, dude!