The Night of Writing Dangerously!

EDITED TO ADD ONE MORE THING: Bethany thanks our fairy godmother HERE. 

EDITED TO ADD  – OMG!!! Bethany made her goal for fundraising. And she BEAT it. Already. This is true: We have a NaNoWriMo fairy godmother watching over us. It's official. And there's something so lovely about that, that someone who, for these three Nights of Writing Dangerously in a row, has donated enough (MORE!!) to send us to an enchanted evening while remaining anonymous . . . Well, it made me choke up and laugh out loud in delight at the same time. Which was a little difficult, but I managed it.   Dear Fairy Godmother, thank you. With all our hearts. xoxox

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My little sister Bethany is fundraising again for the Night of Writing Dangerously (a NaNoWriMo write-athon that supports NaNo's free creative writing programs in hundreds of schools)! If she raises $200, she gets to go to the SWANKY night at the Julia Morgan Ballroom. If she raises $300, she'll take ME as her guest, which she's done for the last two years (lucky lucky lucky me). (It's just the coolest night — a couple of hundred people dressed to the nines, writing their brains out between sips of wine and coffee and bites of chocolate.)

And I can't stand how cute the picture she put up over there is — she's probably about six or seven in that picture, standing behind our little concrete house on Saipan. I love that you can see my mother's carefully gardened strip of earth next to the house, and how groomed the lawn is. Saipan is a tropical island in the Northern Marianas, and the annual rainfall is 84 inches — my mother was out there ALL THE TIME with the push mower, going back and forth, back and forth, while we kids ran around like maniacs. I loved living there (scorpions, centipedes, and typhoons notwithstanding). We snorkeled in the afternoons. My parents let us play wtih machetes, for pete's sake. One of our favorite hobbies was chopping into fallen coocnuts with the dangerously long blade. We felt like we were living on the edge of the earth, and in a way, we were.

Can't you just see mischief in Bethany's eyes? Can't you just see the novels that she is yet to write in that photo?

Thank you, for anything you feel like giving. This is our favorite time of year, and that night is the MOST fun a NaNo-writer can have.