Thoroughly Hooked
Okay, now I can safely admit that I am thoroughly addicted to the NaNoWriMo forums. Hopefully I'll be able to pry myself away long enough to actually get some writing done this November.
So, this past weekend's NaNo get-togethers went off better than I expected. For those that haven't been playing along at home or haven't been following the Meet the Peeps thread, there were two get-togethers in the Triangle this past Sunday; one at the Borders in Chapel Hill and one at Elmo's Diner in Durham.
First up was the Chapel Hill meeting at Borders. The meeting "reservation" (Essentially, I called and asked if we could crash and make merry for an hour or two. They provided us with a table and some chairs.) was in my name so I figured I needed to be there at least fifteen minutes early. So, after a quick trip to my local Office Max to pick up pens and name tags (at Tsaiko's non-request), I was on the road from the intersection of Glenwood and Millbrook at 5:00pm. Plenty of time, right? Well, I found to my dismay that the 15-501 exit from 40 (the one to get to the store) was closed due to construction! The signs pointed to an upcoming detour. The detour came a good five miles away at the 86 exit, and I discovered that I was in the wrong lane for the detour! Oops. In Raleigh and the Park I'm comfortable navigating "on-the-fly" as I normally have a good idea of where I am in relation to certain landmarks. Durham and Chapel Hill? Not so much. Thankfully, I hazily--and correctly--remembered that 86 came pretty close to UNC campus (and in fact intersected with Franklin Street), so I didn't get lost. And I arrived with five minutes to spare.
So I got to the store and (after waiting a bit at the information desk for a table--they were busy with other customers) discovered that Tsaiko and Mel--known on the boards as space_samurai--had already parked themselves in the Art section. As soon as the table arrived, more people started showing up and by the time the late arrivals showed we had twelve people. It was a pretty good mix of college students and the rest of us "old farts" (that is, anyone over 25 for the college crowd). Questions were asked of those of us that participated in previous NaNos about what went right and what pitfalls needed to be avoided (I was the resident expert in that area), and we discussed what we were going to be writing about. But most of the time we simply shot the breeze, and we could have rambled on all night if it weren't for the other meeting. This was fine by me, as I really didn't have any sort of plan for this meeting. To think people were actually looking to me as the Triangle's municipal liaison!
Anyway, the Borders meeting broke up right around 7:30pm, and four of us--David and Anne (I don't remember their board-names), Amelie, and myself--made the trek to Elmo's. There, only seven people showed up: the four of us, Tracy_the_Astonishing, her significant other and a woman whose name escapes me at the moment. This was by and large an older crowd, with most of us in our 30s and only one "college aged" (Amelie). So while the basic format of this meeting was much like the last one, only with food, the discussions were more downbeat and relaxed. Maybe it was because of the food. Who knows? At any rate things petered out between 9:15 and 9:30, and we headed for home except for Amelie, who walked over to her boyfriend's room at Duke.
And a good time was had by all (everybody now...aww). Now I've put the question to everyone on what to do about the mid-month "panic" meeting, and I'm waiting to hear back. I hope we can do something, even if it's a smaller scale. And then, the after-party in December...