NaNo NaNo

Yeah, the Mork reference sucks. Went to the Mama Buzz Cafe in Oakland today to hook up with about 20 or so other local deluded - er, I mean hopeful - would-be novelists to meet and greet before Nov. 1 kicks off this here shebang. The cafe was the standard independent artsy-crowd hangout - mismatched chairs, local artists on the walls, a skinny coffee bar area and a back yard patio for the smokers - but the crowd participating in this thing was anything but - we had peeps like me (whatever that is), grad students, reporters, people who work for a living doing nothing related to writing, a 10-year-old girl, her 13-year-old sister, some twenty-somethings, thirty-somethings, forty-somethings and a few fify-ish types. Pretty impressive, if I say so. And there's supposed to be 50,000 or so of us sharing the in the frustration and creation (and possibly destruction) worldwide this year. I have one word for that: Neat. Very mellow, cool scene. No one was pretentious or weird; it was all just a bunch of people who like to write and want to try and write a lot of words in one month - no matter how badly they are strung together. Kinda refreshing. We're supposed to meet each Monday night from 7-9 p.m. during November to just chill out and write together (not necessarily with one another; just in the same vicinity). Weird thing was, the woman in charge of the local get-together was a friend of Ryan's (this guy I used to work with at the newspaper) and had heard of the SF Business Times. Weirder still (but very pleasantly surprising) is, my brother-in-law is also trying this process. We'll be newbies together. I bet his book rocks. He should make it about Peter Paladin or whatever the hell that character was they (he and Phil and Rob) had made up when they were teenagers. Mmmm, Dungeons and Dragons...