Living the Fictional Dream

I just got home from my writing group’s NaNo kick-off party. It was such a blast. We had it at Kevin’s house, which he’s been fixing up and now it looks awesome. The party was preceded by a write-in, during which, though I was late to due to waiting on the cable man, I managed to complete my homework assignment for the next writing group meeting (writing a paragraph summary/back cover copy style paragraph about my potential NaNo novel). Whew! So that’s out of the way.

We had a great potluck dinner with fantabulous food, too.

But, my favorite part of the evening was our now two-year tradition of playing what we call NaNo Balderdash. Basically, group members contribute people, places, and things from their potential NaNo novels (or any story they’ve written, really), and then we use them for game play.

If you’ve never played Balderdash, it’s great fun! Especially if you’re a writer. The game gives you names, dates, little known vocabulary words, etc., and you have to make up something that describes the clue (March 2, 1837 — The date shoelaces were invented). Then everyone votes for the one they think is correct, and you get points based on how many people vote for what you wrote.

The game is even more fun, IMO, when we’re making up aliases and happenings for the writing group’s characters and fictional happenings.

Though, lately, I’ve come to think that putting your own twist on a game is even more fun than playing by the rules. The past few months at game nights we’ve been playing the game Loaded Questions, but we make up our own questions. (In that one, everyone answers a question like “If you had a superpower, what would it be?” and one person has to guess who wrote which answer.) Made-up Word Scrabble is also fun, though we didn’t have time for that tonight — in that one, you make up the words/spellings with the tiles you have in your rack, but you have to make up a definition for whatever “word” you come up with.

It wouldn’t work for all games… Settlers of Catan, Shadows over Camelot, etc., wouldn’t be as fun if you made up rules. But it totally works for all those group party games.

Well, I guess that’s it for now. Time for me to quit rambling and head for bed! I hope  everyone has a really good Monday!