News & Reviews

WORD: Ready, set, go -- NaNoWriMo 2008 has begun

November 1 means hangovers and smeared makeup for many Halloween revelers, but for some 125,000 authors and wanna-bes it kicks off a month-long effort to write prose during the 2008 National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, NaNoWriMo subgroups have write-ins scheduled, author events, and even their own website for surviving one of those notorious crashes.

In San Francisco, there are nearly 1,500 writers registered for NaNoWriMo 2008, and the local group said in an email that they’ve launched an "official unofficial" website that locals can use when the main NaNoWriMo site crashes due to "the force of an eighth of a million writers descending on a hapless server or two" causing intermittent outages at the main NaNoWriMo site.

If you live, work, or write in San Francisco, you're invited to join them on sfnanos.org, the official unofficial site for San Francisco NaNo writers. This site has all of the simple functionality of the forums but low traffic, so when the main site flickers, they're still on full brightness.

Meanwhile, the East Bay NaNoWriMo chapters are continuing the longstanding trend of write-ins, in which authors bring their laptops to one location and write in a supportive literary environments such as cafes. The following are the scheduled write-ins so far.

BERKELEY

Wednesday, November 5: 7-10pm
Cafe Milano: 2522 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, CA 94702
Hosted by Candace and Rebecca; contact readingredhead07 (at) yahoo.com with any questions.

OAKLAND

Saturday, November 1: 2-4pm
Cafe DiBartolo: 3310 Grand Ave (between Elwood Ave & Lake Park Ave), Oakland, CA 94610
Hosted by Alvin; contact alvin.gregorio (at) gmail.com with any questions.

Wednesday, November 5: 6-8pm
L'Amyx Tea Bar: 3437 Lakeshore Ave (between Longridge Rd & Mandana Blvd), Oakland, CA 94610

See the main NaNoWriMo website for more information, to register anytime this month, and to see some of the local subgroups to join.

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