Saturday, December 5th saw about fifty people come to celebrate the end of National Novel Writing Month. The fun began with an ice breaker created by co-Municipal Liaison Frank Dahlman, where each of five groups was given two characters, a setting, and two objects and told to create a story.
[shashin type=”photo” id=”410,402,401,400,399,398,397,394″ size=”medium” columns=”max” order=”user” position=”center”]
As people came in, Sarah Johnson (anobi), Kaden Patrick (silverwolf42) and Sarah Kovac (SarahK06) gave them Library Crawl raffle tickets in exchange for punching their Crawl cards.
[shashin type=”photo” id=”383″ size=”medium” columns=”max” order=”user” position=”center”]
After a delicious pot luck lunch that featured a wide variety of dishes and desserts, we spoke a bit about the Journey, our year round writing group and then took our group photo:
[shashin type=”photo” id=”526,513,469,480″ size=”small” columns=”max” order=”user” position=”center”]
Thanks to John Mullin (johnthetech) and my wife Nan for these photos.
Why the stuffed animals? It’s a long-standing tradition in our region that dates back to when my daughter, then nine years old, was participating in NaNo.
We then sang our regional song, accompanied by Bart Slimp on guitar, Paula Johannesen on violin, Catherine Brennan (Cee-Bee) on soprano ukulele and myself (Tim Yao) on tenor ukulele):
Afterwards, it was time for our door prize raffle (thanks to Jen Moore (jen.e.moore)Â and John Mullin (johnthetech) and Ed (FredDuck) for contributing to these) and then it was time for the main event: the Library Crawl raffle. There were several Starbucks gift cards, a poster and the big prize, a $100 Amazon gift card that went to Sarah Johnso (anobi):
[shashin type=”photo” id=”543″ size=”medium” columns=”max” order=”user” position=”center”]
This has been a successful NaNoWriMo season. 130 of the 496 regional participants “won” NaNo by completing their 50K+ word novel in November (28%). An astonishing 59% of the 79 participants of the regional word count graph won. Here is the overall distribution:
It is also a time of change. Frank Dahlman (fdahlman) announced that he was stepping down as co-Municipal Liaison at the end of this NaNo. We thank him for his years of service, his innovations and his dedication. Sam, who did a great job in his first year as co-ML, and I will be back next fall.
The full set of photos from the TGIO is available.
We’d like to thank all of our volunteers that helped make this season a success; and also the libraries that participated in our Library Crawl. Helpful donations from Naperville City Councilwomen Judy Brodhead and Becky Andersen and others will ensure that our events will continue next year and in 2017. Thanks very much to Sarah Kovac (SarahK06) for coordinating our second annual Library Crawl. Thanks also to Lisa West and the Naperville Public Library for their continued sponsorship of NaperWriMo. The Writing Journey, our year-round writing group associated with the region, gained two new sponsors: the Woodridge Public Library (Patti Naisbitt) and the Glen Ellyn Public Library (Amy Franco) and we thank them for their generous help.
No Comments