Let’s just start this off by saying that I absolutely HAVE to get some sleep tonight. I’m exhausted, tired beyond myself, enough that I can actually feel my thought processes slowing down… taking a moment longer than usual to decode the senses and stimulae around me. For the first time since I’ve been here I fell asleep on the bus coming in this morning, awaking just before my stop with that sudden head drop forward that I haven’t had a problem with since boring college lectures. Now, part of is was that I didn’t sleep well last night, but I’ve also done tons of things in the last couple days that have kept me busy.
Do you know how sometimes you just have that sense that you are absolutely in the right place at the right time? The end of last week was like that. On Wednesday I went to a NaNo write-in over in Fremont, which is about a half an hour walk from my house. I got there a little early and didn’t spy anyone there who was actually from NaNo… at least noone that was obvious. There were tons of people on their laptops, but that doesn’t mean anything here. The way to tell whether someone is part of NaNo is whether or not they have a rubber duck on their table. Apparently a lot of the early NaNo communities started out on the forums and they were all going to meet at a reading by Chris Baty, the founder of NaNo. But none of them knew what the others looked like, so they decided to all bring rubberducks with them with their usernames written on them so that they would find each other in line. Eventually it became a meme and now the ducks are the theme of the Seattle NaNo community. Well… the hydrophobic duck actually, but that’s a longer story.
It was cold, it looked like it might rain, but goddangit I was going to go to a write-in with real live NaNo human beings. So I set out on a quest towards ballard, the land of locks (seriously, the kind with boats) and bridges (or bridge). So I headed out and found myself in a route that took me alongside closed big box stores and open scrap shops that looked to be working late rendering recently stolen cars into easily saleable materials. I’m sure that wasn’t the case… but that was the appearance.
But I started finding things that were awesome… those little random finds that make a wandering trip so wonderful. I looked through windows and saw a bunch of people climbing on walls and doing jumps, a walk within revealed that this was Parkour Visions, a Parkour class that meets six days a week! (I’ll be going back to there soon). A glance around a series of rocks on the side of the sidewalk found a small bronze statue that I at first thougth was attached to the rocks. A closer look, and a tentative hand grab, revealed that it was in fact a tiny sculpture of three leaves and a grasshopper, all of which looked to have been living at one time and then dipped in bronze, attached to a rock. I took it up and claimed it for my own, naming the grasshopper jam. Jam lives atop my printer now, keeping his watchful eyes upon the text that leaves it. Jam wishes to learn better english skills but is so far disappointed in what he has seen from me. A further walk revealed a mural of a unicorn playing a guitar.
All of these things meant that when I got to the write-in (at a bar!) had a drink, did some word wars, and met some cool people, I really felt as if I had made the right choice coming there. Whenever I find really cool things I just assume that I made the right turns when I was supposed to and the universe is rewarding me for being on that path. It comes form something a bookstore owner told me when I rambled into her store after randomly stumbling upon it to find that she had a 50 cent sale, after just discovering twenty dollars in some bushes.
The next day, Thursday, I was planning on attending a reading for an author I had just read: Cherie Priest. It was a steampunk event, and costumes were encouraged, so I threw together tons of stuff into a bag and right after work I changed into it and caught the bus over to Capitol Hill where the event was. Never having dressed up as steampunk before I wasn’t sure if my costume was up to par, but when I got there I found that I was the most dressed up of all… winning me two tickets to the underground tour and a copy of one of her other books!
But better than that, I sat down next to someone who looked interesting and spent the night talking to her about writing and her books. Luckily though, she was someone Cherie knew, so she kept coming over and chatting and assuming that she had met me before too! I got lots of information about the writing community up here, and I totally need to email those people soon! (I’ll add it to my list of tons of things to do)
Sunday then was a write-in at the Hugo House. The Hugo House is this great resource for writers that I totally need to go to more often. They have writers in residence who are willing to look over your stuff, near-constant workshops that are usually free, readings and events and scholarships and all sorts of stuff to help you write and keep writing. But it was the mid-month write-in for NaNo and had almost 70 people attend at one time (more throughout the day likely). We spent the entire day doing ten minute sprints (write as much as you can in ten minutes) then waiting ten minutes, and then back on for ten more minutes. It was insane… I wrote over 5,000 words during the day. I could have written more, but I was socializing. I met a really interesting man named Dale who participated in Burning Man for the longest time and has backpacked through lots of the world and people my age and older who are interested in all sorts of things. It was lots of fun talking to all of them.
What else have I done? Well… I’m falling behind on my word count but I haven’t given up hope. I took the train down to Portland on Sunday and spent six uninteruptted hours (except for Harry Potter playing on the televisions) writing and got a lot done. While in Portland I visited Powell’s (I LOVE POWELL’S SO FREAKING MUCH) and bought more books than I really should have, as well as getting to see a friend from college who I haven’t seen in a while! I was a little worried about it, seeing as I hadn’t talked to her for two years or so except online rarely, but she was really easy to talk to and we didn’t have any of those awkward silences that plague some of those conversations. Although the weird books in the store helped.