Our 16 Hour Writing Day

On Saturday my sister, Patricia over at Simplicity in Volumes, hosted a 16 hour writing day for our writing group consisting of her, myself, my BFF, Jen and our good friend Darci. We arrived at my sister's house at 6:30 in the morning for a delicious breakfast from Panera Bread complete with soufflé's, bagels, fresh fruit and warm pastries all provided by my wonderful brother-in-law, James.

After we filled our body with fuel for the brain we began our marathon of writing promptly at 7 AM. Did I mention this was all being streamed over the internet on my sister's blog? It didn't take long for me to realize that I am NOT very focused in the early morning. It wasn't just that the girls were so much fun, I really could not transfer the images in my head to words on the paper (or keyboard.) Every time I got stuck I would look for my creativity by laughing with the girls or rubbing the zucchini genie (I'll get to this in a moment) or pulling a prompt from the "Block Box" which was a box filled with writing prompts to assist us along if we were feeling stuck.

By lunch time I had written less than 1000 words, but I had already laughed more in those few hours than I think I have in a long time. I'm talking tears to the eyes kind of laughter. Two more girls from or regional NaNo group joined us at this time, and after refueling with tasty sandwiches, chips and dip, and an assortment of salads we were back to the grind.

I'll take this time to explain the zucchini genie. My sister and her husband had removed all of the summer vegetables from their garden to plant their winter veggies, leaving a lone zucchini. Since all of their winter vegetables are too small to produce veggies, they sometimes forget to check the garden, which has led to the growth of zucchini of unusual size. The zucchini in question was figured to weigh approximately ten pounds.

After refueling with lunch, we all had a burst of energy and managed to pump out some words while having fun. It turns out that this zucchini was very versatile. We were able to tone our arms, play hot potato, rub it for inspiration, and a few R-rated things we won't talk about (wink, wink). Even with all this fun everyone seemed to hit a brick wall around 3 o'clock in the afternoon. The words stopped flowing and everyone looked like they might find a corner to pass out in. That's when James came to the rescue once again with Jamba Juice's with energy boosters for everyone. Woo Hoo! This seemed to do the trick for a while.

Throughout the rest of the day we played, laughed, and wrote. James provided one last, delicious meal from Wood Ranch and then we dwindled down to just three of us, Patty, me and Jen. It wasn't until after dinner that I finally found my creativity and began to really write. We were all determined to put in a decent word count before night's end so we wrote and wrote, and played some more, then wrote and wrote. In the end, we had all put in more than 4ooo words, some of us with over 6000 for the day (great job Jen!) It was an unbelievable experience!

The next day I felt exhausted and could barely write three hundred words, but it was worth every minute of it. Sometimes you just need to surround yourself with fun, crazy friends to push you along with your creativity. Even though we didn't attain the exact word counts we wanted, we all came away feeling refreshed and ready to conquer the rest of this 30-day journey. Thank you to Patty for leading us, hosting this and being a great mentor. Thanks to James for feeding us and entertaining us endlessly. Also, thanks to Quinn at seeing, dreaming…writing for chatting with us when we started and again at the end to see us to the finish line. You definitely kept us from giving up. And thanks to everyone else who checked in on us on the livestream to give us encouragement. Last, but not least thanks to all you girls in the writing group for making it an amazing day, I truly haven't laughed that hard in a long time!