Lift off in T Minus Five

The St Louis NaNoWriMo region had our kick off party on Saturday at Racanelli's on the Loop.  Old friends were reunited, new friends were made, pictures were taken, I discovered I like tiramisu, and found out what an Irish Martini is (irish whiskey, chilled, served in a martini glass, no ice or water).

We've challenged the Columbia MO region to a rematch of last year's Word War.  Something's wrong on the server end, so the Word Count Widgets aren't working yet, but I can get the data from the Regional Scoreboard to fill in my spreadsheet.  (Please don't bug Hubby about the widgets, the code works fine and NaNoWriMo has had it for weeks, but something's wrong with their server config.)

This year I'll be tracking NaNoWriMo donations and our regional donation rank.  We've already surpassed our 2008 donation amount, but Seattle is leaving us all in the shade with their $3840 donated so far.  St Louis has sent in $780 from 11% of our registered wrimos, putting us at the #22 slot, a mere $5 behind our old nemesis, Indianapolis.

Which is all wonderful displacement activity because compared to previous years, I have just the barest outline of my plot and I'm hearing the gathering storm of November just around the corner.  I tried the Snowflake Method of three disasters and an ending and I like it, but I really need to expand the disasters so I'm going back to Vogler and the Hero's Journey to fill in the blanks.  I hope I can get it done in time...