December 3rd was the date of the wonderful TGIO celebration. We started off with two ice breakers devised by co-ML Katherine (KatherineWriting). The second of these was to write a 100 words (or less) short short story from the perspective of a plot critter. Her tale went like this:

Soft. Crowded, but soft, lots of sleep.
Daylight. Room to breathe. “Ouch! That's hot.”
“I can see!”
“Wait, is that a hot glue gun? Ouch! That
 really, really hurts.”
“I don't need a tail. Ouch.”
“Okay, the tail is kinda cute, but really,
 I'm done now. Don't come near me with that
 —ouch!”
Noise. Lots of murmuring from the supplies
cupboard. “Come on, critters. We can disable
that glue gun. On the count of—what do you mean
we wouldn't exist without it?”
“I didn't think of that.”
“Creativity can be painful.”

The efforts of Paula (catatone1), Melissa (ziplizard), Gabi (LemonFairy), and Joe (Corrupted Flame) from the TGIO:

I felt ignored all month long.

There was a lot of camaraderie and chit chat; here are Ky (scrapacat) and Katherine (Squiddish):

I believe Carly (thePiratess) won the first raffle and chose the book that Carol (CJGEV) donated (and I selected): Writing for Emotional Impact. Also raffled off: another Chris-Baty-signed poster (worth $100), several of our own region-signed posters, a pair of blank journals and a special set of knitted fingerless gloves and a scarf made and donated by Paula (catatone1). The last one, won by Becky, is here modeled by Paula:

We sang our regional song and paid off our debt to Maryland (who defeated us in this year’s word war by 2000 words per wrimo) and we had an excellent discussion about the Journey.

There are many folks who are interested in Katherine’s (KatherineWriting) proposed Editing/Rewriting/Publishing track; Julie (J.A.Kosse) has kindly offered to lead one or two sessions on the lessons she’s learned about getting an agent. Roger (Roger Lubeck) and several others volunteered to be Editors of short story anthologies (should we need any). And many of those present expressed great interest in doing another short story anthology.

The Journey is a cafeteria-style writing group. People can propose different tracks and champion them; participation is just limited to those who vote with their feet.

There actually was interest in doing a writer’s retreat. We’ll have to see how that goes this year.

New author Marie Lu talks about social networking and writing YA fiction: interesting, short article for those wanting to get published.

Seventeen stalwart wrimos showed up at the 95th Street Library to write today (Sunday, November 27th). This was the final Naperville Public Library write-in of the season (there are still a few other write-ins in the final three days of NaNoWriMo).

111127_95th_street_write-in

You can see that folks made great progress on their novels:

Joe won the plot dragon, Sarah the “fluffalo”, Katherine (Thing 2) the plot lion.

WritingStudent, scrapacat, squiddish, WriterPete and I broke in the new Box Of Doom today, held some convention word wars and enjoyed a productive morning at Caribou (@Dominicks plaza in Naperville). Then WritingStudent, scrapacat, Squiddish and I went off to lunch at Chipotle (fun!):

111126_nano_writein

Sorry–I’ve been too busy with work and actual writing of my novel to post these till now. Still–enjoy!

From the Downers Grove Caribou Write-in (Tuesday, Nov 22)

From 111123_downers_grove_writein_plot_critters

From 111123_downers_grove_writein_plot_critters

111123_downers_grove_writein_plot_critters

Plot Critters

From 111123_downers_grove_writein_plot_critters

Box of Doom

Adding spice to our word wars…

From 111123_downers_grove_writein_plot_critters

Pictures from Woodridge and Nichols

111119_111120_nano_writeins

From 111119_111120_nano_writeins