Event Announcement: Who Killed NanoSessionMo?
- Uncategorized
- August 8, 2024
Come with me, if you will, back to the days of 2015. It was a time when the USA could honestly say it had never had Donald Trump as a President, a time when most normal people didn’t know what a “Brexit” was, when the 2012 Olympics were just a thing that had happened and the MCU still had seemingly boundless narrative potential.
It was also an age when the Nine Worlds Geekfest was still an annual event, an inclusive and accessible convention that is still sorely missed today. And it is into that convention that I brought NaNoSessionMo.
What Was NanoSessionMo?
A horribly mangled play on the concept of “NaNoWriMo” (where people challenged themselves to write an entire novel within the space of the month of November), NaNoSessionMo challenged an entire room full of people to come up with, plot and write an entire book within the space of one 75-minute convention session.
And we did, it nine years ago to the day.
It was an intentionally foolhardy exercise, one that attracted coverage from The Guardian. According to this article at Flavorwire, we risked “transforming literature into what it shouldn’t be: alienated labor.”
But against all odds it actually kind of worked, and without destroying authorship as a profession (chronic underinvestment in the arts and LLMs would have to step in to try and finish that job).
The resulting novella, Phantom of the Space Opera (which you can still read here) chronicled a music-loving cyborg’s journey through the bowels of a spaceship for the love of the ship’s AI, and the story actually hung together despite none of its 29 authors having read any of the other authors’ chapters before the book was assembled.
And now, nine years later, I want to try again.
But this time I’m making it harder.
One month from now, Edge-Lit is taking place at Derby’s QUAD, offering a busy day of panels, workshops, readings, and interviews with an array of genre fiction talent from around the UK and beyond.
And at the very end of the day, sadly clashing with the convention’s additional raffle, but before the evening pub quiz (which I may also be involved with), I will be running a new workshop under the name Who Killed NaNoSessionMo?
Writing Can Be Murder
Phantom of the Space Opera was an achievement, but given the time we had there were certain things we did to keep things easy. A combination of Quest Narrative and Dan Harmon’s “story circle” meant we were able to create a pretty tightly structured, linear story that didn’t require too much more planning than your average game of consequences.
This time we’re abandoning the quest narrative.
This time if you come and join our writing collective, you will be helping us to write a whodunnit murder mystery.
Within the space of a single session we will come up with the victim, the means, motive and opportunity that formed their murder, the suspects behind that murder, the idiosyncratic detective who solves the murder and the clues that will lead them to finally reveal who the murderer is, and we will write the entire thing down in a story that will somehow, we hope, make sense.
Of course, to attempt something this daring you will want to know that you are in safe hands, so let me assure you – With a professional writing career that spans three decades (from the end of the 00s to the beginning of the 20s, but it sounds like longer doesn’t it?), and several books to my name, outside of a few mystery-themed TTRPG scenarios, I have never actually written a whodunnit. Not one.
There is a very real chance this could end in total disaster.
So, help me out, yeah?
What You Will Need
If you want to be part of this absolutely nerve-wracking experiment in collective novel-writing, join us in the QUAD’s Meeting Room at 4pm on the 7th of September during the Edge-Lit convention (which you will need a ticket for, OOH LOOK! A LINK!). Bring a laptop or a pad of paper and a pen – I’m not going to lie, a laptop for preference as last time we did this we relied heavily on one of the con organisers heroically typing up and proofing an epic sheaf of handwritten pages, and she’s not going to be here this time.
You can find out more about what is going on at Edge-Lit by following their Twitter account, here.
As for what will happen during the session, there is very little I can tell you yet – partly to preserve the sense of spontaneity and invention the event is designed to spark, and partly because I am still very much figuring out how this whole thing is going to work anyway.
If we succeed (which I’m sure we will, I mean, how hard can it be?) the finished product will be published (for free) at the Scarlet Ferret independent e-bookshop, a fantastic place to get indie-published e-books without lining Jeff Bezos’s pocket, which also happens to stock other books you might want to buy.
See you there, and God save us all.
