Weird how you can talk things up sometimes. After yesterday’s post about sickeningly enormous nano word counts I went to my local wrimo write-in and found myself next to a couple of (very non-sickening) young women with (extremely sickening) word counts of 37,000 and… 49,500. The latter actually won nano whilst sitting beside me.

It is day eleven. What the fricking frick is going on? Now I’m a fast typist (used to be 150 wpm in my Glory Days, which weren’t that glorious at all actually, as a London secretary) and ask me how quickly the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog and the answer is: pretty damn quickly. But, still. I mean, that’s insane, right? (Please tell me I’m right.)

What does a dog have to do to get some sleep around here?

             Image source

And I can vouch for the fact that Miss 49-thousand-er* was neither lying, nor writing Shining style (as I suggested yesterday) because I had the tiniest of tiny crafty glances at her screen and they were proper sentences n all that. And she wasn’t wielding a pick-axe, nor bouncing a ball against the ballroom walls, nor developing strangely peaked eyebrows.

But she was writing with an almost inhuman speed. Like a nano-bot, you might say. No pauses. I had a little burst like this, myself, last week, but I can’t sustain it long term. I need to pause, look up, look out, reflect, make tea, unravel my legs occasionally. Another gunfire burst as the words spurt out, then head up again – above the parapet – and kettle back on.

What was even stranger, last night, was the way they launched straight in without stopping to think: whenever I come ‘cold’ to my laptop, I need to be wound up first with my little invisible key (oh, all right, if you want to be all factual about it, I need to read back over what was last written; or, sometimes, read another writer’s work) before the music box begins to crank out its tune and, as for that plastic ballerina on her springy leg… you wait all day for a pirouette, and then three come along at once.

Writing, eh.

* Through the magic of twitter, I’m reliably informed that Nanobot Maximus of the 49000+ words, is in fact a local nano legend with the twitter handle @RiaJay21, and well worth a follow.)