Yesterday I headed out with some of the London NaNoWriMo crew… and Emily, who is the perfect companion for most things on the first ever *drum roll* NANORILLA! To give you some context, Nanorilla was conceptualised by Jenn and Claire as a guerrilla (hence the rilla) writing event where we would go around central London, visiting some iconic spots and then sit down to write in short bursts, someone mentioned the idea of doing it for charity, I jumped on the bandwagon and suggested we added it to my Barnardo’s effort, Frank named it Nanorilla, everyone tweeted themselves stupid and voila… joyful chaos.
We started on the steps of St Paul’s, which was pretty awesome, since, although I have lived in London for five and a half years now, I’ve never been there. The twitter crew was very lucky since Jenn and Claire had made us signs. This is mine. It has a cello on it because the protagonist in my novel plays the cello.
And this is Ian’s. How fricking awesome is his hat?
From there we thought we might just pop into Starbucks, because it was so cold and windy that everyone’s typing/scribbling hands were seizing up. It was clearly a place of creativity because this is where Frank invented the concept of stick novels: a whole plot handily written on the back of a wooden coffee stirrer. Mine were intensely crap but some of the group were awesome at it, Mai’s Nabokov inspired controversial stick novel being particularly impressive. Look how excited Sarah is about the stick novel she’s reading!
By the time we got to the Tate Modern, Emily, Mai and I were so cold that we bought hats. Anyone who knows me will know that I’m a bit hat phobic, not only because of hair destruction but because hats make me feel claustrophobic, but in this situation it was absolutely essential. Mine has earflaps and a bobble. I might even wear it again. We went to see Miroslaw Balka’s How It Is, which was very cool and very strange… and no I did not cheat by lighting my path with my sonic screwdriver… okay maybe a little bit.
This is also where we took on A Day In Hand for Sshh! A Day In Hand looks at the fact that it’s still socially unacceptable in some places for gay couples to hold hands in public and so on a Day In Hand, people like us, who believe this is absolutely ridiculous show our protest by holding hands with people of the same sex, no matter if we’re gay or straight. Em and I held hands for a while. I didn’t think anyone would notice or care, so I was pretty shocked by some of the looks we got. Made me very sad, but anyway, here is a fabulous shot of Ben and Frank’s hand holding efforts.
This was followed by possibly the best guerrilla writing spot we found, an alcove on a bridge that fitted all of us perfectly. Sadly, I don’t know which bridge it was, but it was a nice one. Several tourists stopped to wave, stare… and take pictures. One lady, in particular, insisted that we all look up and pose and became annoyed when we got distracted by actual writing.
A drink in Covent Garden was followed by the pub, where much rubbish was spoken, more stick novels were written, Jay wore Lindsey’s coat, I tried unsuccessfully to keep my Bowie’s out of Ian’s face, many people tried on Sarah’s hat, Frank failed to stop us from touching him and the dance-off was discussed at length but never happened.
And in all that we raised just over £70 for Barnardo’s… RAWK!!!! Thank-you so much, guys! If anyone from Nanorilla wants the log in for my blog, please message me and I’ll send it to you and if anyone else still wants to donate, you can do so here.
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