What’s not to love about writing in a small, enclosed space hurtling around the Lower Mainland at almost 90 kilometres per hour? Maybe a dead laptop battery, but that’s pretty much it.

Join the Vancouver Wrimos as we take advantage of one of our region’s natural resources: the SkyTrain. Saturday, November 21st we will be meeting at Waterfront Station in the CP Station (up by the ticket vending machines for the SkyTrain & SeaBus, Starbucks and Jugo Juice), hop on a train, and ride our laptop batteries to nubbins. Allow two to three hours of continuous novel writing, except maybe when we might have to get off at the ends to make sure we don’t get stuck. For those with short laptop battery lives, plan ahead and bring a pen & paper solution; there will be a shortage of plugs on the cars. Jennerosity and MysteriousAges will be making use of Twitter to provide location updates if anyone wants to pick us up along the way.

We will be writing until 90% of computers are dead, which will probably be more than 90 minutes; if you don’t have a Monthly Pass or a U-Pass, you will need to invest in a Daypass. Info on where to pick up such a thing is available here on the TransLink website. The standard fares are only valid for 90 minutes, or 1.5 hours so ensure you have a valid pass for the duration of the event. We will be making a couple ‘rest stops’ during the event, probably as we switch between lines. If your laptop battery is feeble, or doesn’t work at all, we suggest using an alternate method of writing: low-tech, non-electronic, good old pen/pencil and paper. Worried about having to retype all those words for NaNoWriMo’s word counter? Don’t! Count up your non-computerized words, and then copy & paste that many words of Lorem Ipsum or Wikipedia into your file. You’ve got all of December to transcribe your analogue words, and this is a perfectly valid solution.

Since this is a public write-in, anyone who comes will be expected to be on their very best writing behaviour, and avoid the temptation to scribble things on parts of the train cars if they run out of paper (it will be difficult to bring the trains home with you), not be talking too loudly (other passengers might take your novel ideas) and other general “best behaviour” sorts of things. This is the first time VancoWrimo is organizing an event like this. It’d be nice if we could do it again next year.