Write In

Yesterday was Seattle's halfway point for Nanowrimo (said point being either the 15th or the 16th of the month as one prefers, though there is some contention as to the day; it's like a much less important version of the debate about Easter.) As per every year, there's a big get together in some place with a lot of space and some coffee, and a bunch of people show up with their laptops and peck away at the novels while being surrounded by their fellows, occasionally engaging in sprints (type as much as you can in a short period) or word wars (challenge a neighbor to write more in a generally slightly longer period than a sprint). There are prize drawings that you usually enter by achieving some number of words, for instance, one ticket per thousand words written.
I've never actually gone to a write in at all; most of them are smaller versions of the halfway get-together, with six or eight people in a cafe somewhere on Wednesday night for two hours. But the atmosphere was incredibly conducive to writing, and even though I was only on site for an hour, and some of that was spent getting set up and buying a beer and so on, I put up 2000 words on the WiP. (A caveat to that: I thought I wrote 2500 words; I'm writing the book on Google Drive, but had to port it to Open Office, and they count words so differently that I ended up with an extra 500 in Open Office. So that's what I wrote down, that I'd done 2500, but the extra 500 were scattered throughout my 35000 word document, so they didn't actually count. I felt bad about faking my honor system number unintentionally, even though I claimed no raffle tickets at all, so it didn't matter. I am built for guilt.)
The point being, it was pretty fun, and I think I might trek out and find more of them in the next couple of weeks, see if the feeling stands, and if I can crank out such big numbers so quickly which I'm not often able to do on my own.
(I was also able to donate a couple copies of Engines to serve as prizes, which were well received, and which was a relief, as I'm looking at the box full of them and wondering what will happen with them all, and coming up blank.)