evil northern overlord

This is Part 1, in which I pull off a 10K day and obtain a shiny Eevee, in case you were curious.

I kept on meaning to post this for a while and was being a lazy bum about it, but here it all is now. I really have to get out of the habit of seeing longer posts as a chore. Anyway as I said in the first post of this series, in the last few years I'd been lapsing in how much I got into the spirit of NaNo. I was participating and winning, but not really getting into the social aspects of it. But because the forums last year were such a nice place, and I wanted more places to socialise, I jumped in. Initially I afflicted with Brighton but after trying out write ins both there and in London, I decided to stick with the latter.

The third weekend of NaNo was NaNorilla, a novelling crawl across London. You go to places, you write a bit, and then you go somewhere else. Having only ever done normal venue based write ins, this was something I really wanted to try out.

( The day, with photos )

Next time: Doctor Who, and the London Literary Lockin. Or: why London is tied with Yorkshire for best region.

I still don't get productivity advice that tells you that you can't be productive unless you get up at stupid o'clock in the morning. Screw that! We all have the same number of hours, does it really matter which ones you use so long as they're what works for you? Because I tell you I am not productive at five AM unless I've come to it from the long way around.

Okay. That said, I wanted to talk a bit more about NaNo this year. I think I'd fallen off the ride in recent years. Okay I'd done NaNo and won it, but I hadn't really jumped in as much as I could have done. This year I've been hanging out on the forums, going to events, and really getting into the spirit of things rather than knocking out my 50K and being done with it all. And this way around is way more fun. I don't even know why I stopped using the boards so much.

I actually love forums as a socialisation venue, but I get little chance to use them because so many have nasty atmospheres. The NaNo boards, though, are one of the nicest places I've seen, at least this year they have.

So. Things I did. The first weekend was the Brighton write-in. Not much to say about that, really. The second weekend was my first London write-in that got me involved in the other end of the region, but also my 10K day on Saturday. I have proved that there is one thing you can do that will reliably make me write 10,000 words in a day.



Hey, turn around so everyone can see you!



That's better.

I've been hanging out in the Pokemon threads a lot (hint: this is a great way to get friend codes too). A few days before Saturday one of the regulars posted that they had a shiny Eevee to go to whoever wrote the most words that day. I wasn't originally going to, but when I started doing well on Saturday, I got stuck in, fired up Write or Die, and made a proper effort. 10K days are weird. You never really know when you're going to have one. When it's going badly, just a thousand words can be too much of an effort. When it's going well, they all just slip by. Suddenly, you have 10K, and you're not really sure where it all came from.

Okay, I do know about 2K of that was a speech made by my villain, which was painful to write because of what a scumbag he was, but it was worth it. And it was an easy 2K. And it's not like it's out of character for him to do that, he's the sort of guy who'd make speeches for half the book if you'd let him. Spoiler: I didn't. I'm not that horrible.

It took a while for the winners to be announced, because it turned out another person besides myself broke 10K, and the person organising it wanted to breed another for them, but I finally got him. One water stone later:





He will eventually be going to live with pointytilly because they have wanted a shiny Vaporeon forever, but I've been enjoying having him around for now. I've never had a 6th gen shiny so far despite it feeling like the rest of the world has, and I'm looking forward to when I can transfer up the ones I have in past games.

Anyway the day after that I went in to a London write-in and bagged another 6K.

Now that's productivity.