Exhausted and speedy all at once, after two days away from the novel. As my buddy Devin Harnois puts it, “I want to take a nap and conquer the world.”

But tonight I went to our region’s TGIO (Thank God/Goodness It’s Over) party for National Novel Writing Month, and remembered why I like this so much. Highlights:

• Hearing everybody’s weird plot points, and trying to one-up each other. “But my talking skull is the romantic lead!” (Yes, I actually said that. Though properly he doesn’t announce his romantic interest in Our Heroine until he has a body.)
• Watching the younger generation pull off great things. There were the teenagers who’d done NaNoWriMo since they were 11, and then there was the first-time participant (age 6?) who needed to stand on a chair to read his story excerpt.
• Food, and fun, and laughs, and all of us hamming it up reading our excerpts and realizing that we can do some pretty OK things on the first pass.
• Gathering courage for the long march through revisions.
• Exchanging screen names and requests for private messages so we can beta-read each other’s novels. I renewed my New Year’s Resolution to become the best possible editor of my own and other’s work.

Oh yes, and comparing notes on fight scenes. Fight scene in a bog is really tough. Someone will be eaten by the bog by the end of it.

(And that’s probably the last time for a while that I’ll get to use that tag, until I start researching and writing on that particular technical point.)