Nanowrimo Writing Dates and Synergy

Back when I was a beginning writer we used to do something – and we got the idea from stories Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith told.  (No, this does not mean we killed our secret pen names in a love triangle murder suicide, though – given mine – it’s something I have considered on occasion.  Well, I’ve considered killing them, and a love-triangle murder suicide is JUST what they all deserve.  I’ll make it in sordid circumstances!)

First I must explain that much as I hate to admit it, we writing couples are different.  Sorry.  We’re wonderfully, amazingly, extraordinarily more… dorky than anything you non-writing couples can imagine.   Starting in the mists of time, when the kids were toddlers, I heard of other couples having “date nights” every week.  This seemed a little odd, since we got in our dating time the first year of marriage, like we were supposed to (at least like we were supposed to, because we never dated before marriage, due to the Atlantic Ocean being in the way and never moving out of the way, not even when we nudged it with our knee.)

But we did have our very own equivalent of date nights.  Since waaaay back then we didn’t have a writing group and the very concept was somewhat alien, and since I spent my writing day surrounded by non-verbal people, sometimes I just needed to talk a plot point out.  So when Dan got home I’d already have called our friend who would babysit for us (not afraid of way too smart kids – hi Charles!) and be ready to go.  We’d pick some place with slow service, a quiet atmosphere and servers with nerves of steel.  The latter was very needed since otherwise they panicked when they heard us discussing body disposal methods.

Well, Kris and Dean talked of something similar – the intensive writing retreat.  We tried it twice, with our friends, Rebecca and Alan Lickiss.  In the form we did it, we got the kids out of our house (and into theirs, with a trusted sitter – hi Charles!) Then we set up writing areas for each of us in our house.  And then we wrote from mid-Friday to mid-Sunday.  When taking breaks, for coffee or water or something, we tossed whatever we’d finished so far on the larger coffee table.  Other people could add, or sit down and read, because late on Sunday there was a critique session before they went home.

I think the lowest wordage for those weekends was 15k words.  The highest was 40k.  And since we inevitably went out to eat on Saturday night and took a bit of time, plus there were talks in the kitchen late at night, it wasn’t bad at all.

We could never replicate it on our own, not even when we had an internet one.  There is something about more than one writer in a house, concentrating only on writing, at the same time, and doing nothing else, with no distractions.

It’s better than one writer in one place, concentrating only on writing, even.

Some of you, who have had occasion to call me or email me, know that I do this sometimes, when criminally late – I find a hotel with really cheap rates and hole up for a week or so and just write like a demon.  It works.  I mean, it’s better than being at home with the kids, the cats and the telephone.  (Better in the sense of my writing more.  I rather enjoy the kids and the cats.)
But it is not the same as having a group, all pulling at the same time, in a small space.  This is why if I could and had other writers in the city I could do this with, I’d rent a communal office to do it in.  I think the same synergy would develop.

Nanowrimo of course is not the same synergy, or not quite.  There’s also the fact that if you are connecting through the Nanowrimo site, you end up talking more than you write.  Some people there, I swear, live to talk.  Which is why I don’t do official Nano site anymore.  BUT Nanowrimo connecting with a small group who reports in, really seems to help.

Still not the same.  We also tried to do writing weekends where we connected via the net and it didn’t seem to raise the same feel.  Real life still intrudes.  So 60k words in a month are okay, but 40k in 48 hours are beyond us.

However, we found out by accident, on the weekend of a con when both of us had stories due for an antho, that the same synergy develops when Dan and I go away Friday through Sunday alone and both of us write.  It’s actually romantic, because (around the con) we got a couple of meals out alone in.  But even with those and the con panels, we wrote as much as we did at those long-ago writing retreats.

Since I found this out, I’ve had this dream where we get to do that about once a month and I get ahead of my schedule.  The problem is that it’s never been possible.  When I first wanted to do that, we’d just moved to this house and were paying on both houses, so I thought “when the house sells we’ll start doing it.”

When the house sold, there were a few other emergencies, and now there are college tuition costs.

So, I’m thinking…  If the donation button on this site raises only enough to pay for a weekend for us (two nights) away at a hotel per month (we’re cheap dates.  No, not as cheap as the hotel we first stayed in for Liberty last year, before moving to the con hotel.  I don’t like worrying about rats) it will have conferred an incredible boon on us.

See, it’s always been for writers that the more you wrote the more you made.  But under the new model that’s much more so.  Instead of fifty percent of your stuff being published (and the rest often waiting years, not on quality – I sold some of it years later, and at least one story that took me eight years to sell was a year’s best fantasy and horror honorable mention – but on “it doesn’t fit our needs” or rather it didn’t fit what they were looking for [I never managed to sell any of my future history short stories, set in the same timeline as Darkships because ‘your future history is not logical’ – ah!]  And I have all these series started: the musketeers mysteries, the refinishing mysteries, orphan kittens, the Shifters, Darkships and the rest of the future history stuff.  I have fans waiting for each of those, and, of course, I can only write a book at a time.  But if I get that weekend away I’ll do them faster.  And weirdly I always come back from that type of experience felling energized (Yes, I’m broken.  Deal.)

At any rate, I think the button has done that this month, for which I thank you more than I can say (though we might postpone the onset of these till January because November is a holiday and two birthdays in this household, and then we hit the holiday season.  Or maybe not.  It occurs to me that a weekend of writing is a wonderful birthday present for self.)

Hopefully it will continue and be one of those self-feeding things: the more I write, the more I can afford to give away on the site as a loss leader, the more donations I get, which make me write more/faster, which means more properties I can either write-in-public or give away under the free short story tab (story changes every week.)

So, again, thank you to everyone who has hit that button.  It will be used to promote writing (so I don’t need to steal the kitty kibble money) more and faster and hopefully better.

Meanwhile, it’s time I got out of here and went to officeish.  I have two novels to finish.