NaNoWriMo 2016 – NaNocialising

I’ve now got a backlog of blog entries I want to write.  Yesterday’s entry missed out one of the great ways of boosting my, your, everyone’s word count: writing while travelling.  An essential skill in my opinion.  And today, a great person I know said they were lacking in motivation, so I’d like to try and address that.

What is this becoming, a NaNo self-help blog?  Well, no.  I can only tell you what works for me.  I don’t dare speak for the majority.  About the only thing that seems to be universally agreed on as helpful is write-ins.

But write-ins have another side – in my opinion, an even better side.  That’s the social aspect of NaNo.  I mentioned ‘a great person I know’.  There are a lot of them involved in this movement.

I work in an office job.  By nature of what exactly I do, I probably deal with more people like me than in your average office job.  By which I mean: relatively socially awkward, nerdy interests, sincerely friendly because we’re not adept enough at socialising to put on a convincing façade, more into Internet culture than popular culture.

But I started NaNo in my old office, which had a bunch of people whose interests were: work, family, football, marathons, gym.  None of which are bad interests, I should stress!  I just didn’t feel like we had much in common.  I like classical music, videogames, and nerd culture.  Only after I took up following cricket did I feel I could talk to (some of) these people.

At NaNo, it’s all different.  Every other person plays games of some kind.  If they didn’t, they usually have comparable or superior Internet knowledge to me, or have another non-mainstream hobby (Hipster Bingo).  And obviously we all have at least one interest in common.

There’s no ‘networking’.  All communication is sincere (well, I’m southern British so there’s an underlying passive-aggressive current, but relatively sincere).  These are people I’d happily hang out with and go for drinks with, without being forced to do so by work.  People I’d probably never meet otherwise: most of us are pretty introverted.

And the office buzzwords… well, they were replaced by a set of NaNo buzzwords, frankly.  But I chose to adopt those, so I didn’t, don’t, begrudge them as much.

If you’ve not been to a NaNo event of any type, and want to make new and interesting friends, I would seriously advise giving it a go.  Even if you have some form of societal anxiety.  I can’t relate, I’ll be honest with you; but there will be other people in that room with the same anxiety as you.  At times, NaNo reminds me of the time at uni. when six of us were sitting on the grass, of whom three were discussing their anti-anxiety medications.  What a blast that was.

My actual writing, which is being reduced to more and more of a footnote in this blog as time goes on, has also benefited.  I went from just scraping par for yesterday before the write-in, to well on top of par for today after.  That’s the peer pressure, that is.  That’s the ‘being there to write’.

After fleeing a pub confrontation, Lumia has managed to persuade Cait to come on a journey with her.  I possibly need to be a bit more specific about the subject of the journey, but that will come shortly.  Meanwhile, antagonist Leon has met the king, annoyed the king, and had a staircase fall out from under his feet.  If he weren’t the antagonist and if it weren’t the third chapter of the book, that might have been a tense cliffhanger.  As such, I’ll just say this: owls.

No in-jokes today, sadly: I think they’ll probably decrease in number as I find myself trying to write an actual story.  No lyrics either.  What even is this.  (Non-cricket-related continuous prose, you say?  Shuddup you.)

And so the sun sets (or rather has already set) on the first weekend of NaNoWriMo 2016.  I hope you enjoyed it.  All those inspirational quotes about the journey being more important than the destination have never been more true for me than they have been with NaNo.  Except it’s not the places I visit along the way: it’s the people.