Our group of National Novel Writing Month participants stood at the bottom of the stairway to Mt. Bonnell, a park situated on the overlook of Lake Austin. We imagined our rebellious bodies jogging to the highest point of the city via an impossibly long set of steps.
And didn't move.
Three members of our group had only been awake 45 minutes, having drowned their inner editors at the Margarita Write-In the night before. We were supposed to have hit 25,000 in our word count, as we were mid-month in our race to reach 50K by the end of November. This meant not reading or correcting our work, but writing furiously to make the goal.
Some of us hadn't hit the benchmark. We'd have to come from behind.
I turned to CoyoteBlue (we address each other by our screen names on the NaNoWriMo forums) and pointed to the boom box. "It's time," I said. "Hit it."
The opening chords to "Gonna Fly Now" from the first and best Rocky blared from the speakers, and we started up the one hundred steps, motivated by the cliché, the universality of getting past the road hump of inaction and into determination.
For Breca_Halley, one of the municipal liaisons who organizes the Austin write-ins, the climb marked her fifth year of manic noveling. She had fallen off pace early on, but caught up on her word count during a twelve-hour lockdown where fellow writers worked all night.
Ballyhoot started up the steps from a difficult position. One week into his first novel race, he had an accident, rolling his car three times into a field. He had also fallen behind, resorting to scribbling on notebooks in doctors' offices to keep his novel going. Despite the setback, he started up the stairs only 4,000 words short of the halfway point.
National Novel Writing Month itself is ten years old this November, boasting over 115,000 participants worldwide. The Austin group, known as the Penguins, has crossed the five million mark to take the ranking of the 18th highest grossing city with a little over 300 writers posting word counts.
The Rocky Write-In kicked off the second half of the sprint to finish the challenge. Despite our quick start up the steps, ready to be inspired by the view, everyone slowed partway. Then CoyoteBlue held up the boom box, and just as suddenly, we took off again, laughing as the jolt to our systems, the cold, the exercise, and an oft-parodied theme song began working its motivational magic.
We were ready to go the distance.
For more pictures from the NaNoWriMo "Rocky" Write-In, visit this gallery of Deanna Roy's photos. And see images from last year's Austin NaNoWriMo Nature Write-In.
