This weekend was a crazy one.

I spent most of Thursday and Friday sleeping and drinking water furiously in hopes of getting better in time for Extra Life, the 25 hour gaming marathon meant to raise money for the Children’s Miracle Network. I mentioned this on here before, but my team (Geekyhostess, Satire and the rest of Team Hypercube) host a 25 hour live show so folks can interact with us while we attempt to play games straight for all that time. I am now happy to report that we’ve done it for two years in a row, though I personally struggled a bit more than the rest of them.

We agreed that I should come a few hours late, so I didn’t start the day off poorly. While my lovely team began gaming at 8am on Saturday, I took my time, took some medicine, and waltzed in around 10:30. But then I was great! My nose was significantly less stuffy, my head felt less explodey and I managed to take part in a surprising number of games. I started feeling woozy again around 10pm, but to be perfectly honest – making it 12 hours on the upswing of a cold was largely impressive.

During the time that I was on, some highlights included: playing King of Tokyo, testing out the Job Hunters RPG, Cash and Guns, You Don’t Know Jack, and of course, Babycam. I also quite enjoyed scary game hour, and listening to the rest of the team making their silly themed Magic the Gathering decks.

It’s a bummer that I was sick, but we had a LOT of fun doing Extra Life anyway. Everyone in the chat was incredibly supportive and great, we got to try a lot of new games, and we managed to double our goal — hitting $2,000 raised by 6am!

Thank you to everyone who stopped by the live stream, and furthermore THANK YOU to the amazing people who donated. You can still donate here if you missed it and want to help out.

Now it’s time to catch up on NaNoWriMo after the craziness of Extra Life is over. Be sure to follow me on twitter for word sprints this month!

Hello blog readers!

Today is one of the craziest days of the year and of course, because fate is cruel – I’m a big pile of sniffling, achey congestion. So even though tomorrow I plan to play 25 hours straight hours of video games to raise money for Seattle Children’s Hospital, and it’s the start of my month-long novel writing marathon… the only thing I’m working toward today is seeing if it’s possible to use an entire box of Kleenex in a single sitting.

Currently I’m winning.

I’m also currently sitting at 315 words on my NaNoWriMo novel, because I’m a boss. And by “boss” I mean “really disappointed that the first year I’m finally not hungover from post Halloween shenanigans, my head feels like it’s going to explode anyway”.

Anyway, every word I type here is both taking up energy I don’t have and keeping me away from working on my word count (…or napping) so I’ll make this short and sweet.

1. If you interested at all in Extra Life, the gaming marathon to raise money for the Children’s Miracle Network, you can check out our live stream starting at 8am on November 2nd and going until 8am the following day. We have a whole list of activities planned that you can read about here, and if you feel sufficiently moved, you can also make a donation here. It’s for the kids. 🙂

2. If there’s any part of you that ever even once thought “NaNoWriMo sounds like fun…” today is your day. Just start. Start writing and see where it takes you. Finally give yourself the gift of time and focus and just start. Sign up on NaNoWriMo.org and add me as a writing buddy!

And if you want to send any good, healing thoughts my way… that would be much appreciated. I’m quite tired of this cold and would like to get on with all the marathoning I have planned for this month.

Let me know what you’re writing about for NaNoWriMo this month in the comments. I love hearing what other people are doing! And good luck!

In addition to being in up to my eyeballs in Halloween party planning and putting together another epic 24 hour live show for Extra Life – I’ve also got the pre NaNoWriMo jitters something fierce. We’re still three weeks out, but I find it creeping into the back of my mind pretty regularly already. What am I going to write? How am I going to make the time? Is anyone going to do it with me?

That’s why I decided to post a pep talk video early this year, to make sure those of you on the fence about it have ample time to mull it over. Here is that video!

I will likely be posting more videos to help participants along this year, as well as hosting my usual word sprints on twitter. Make sure you’re following me if you want to join in the fun!

I’ll also be heading down to San Francisco for the Night of Writing Dangerously – it’s a gala/write-a-thon they throw every year to raise money for their organization (as well as their free creative writing programs in hundreds of schools and communities all over the place), which I am all about supporting. I am trying to raise $500, which is minuscule compared to the amount this project has done for me over the years. If you’re interested in donating, here’s a link to my funding page.

How do you decide what to write each year? Usually I start with format – do I want to write a “diary” book? First person? Letters between people? Back and fort POV between two characters? Then I figure out the genre I’m interested in, and then start to flesh out the details. Let me know your methods in the comments!

And as usual, if you get stuck, you can always rewatch my NaNoWriMo music video. It’ll be trapped in your head for days, at the very least. 🙂