HOW WE MET

http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/archives/2004/Jan/

It was a dark and stormy night during the early days of NaNoWriMo 2010 and I decided to hang out for a night in the Michigan NaNo chat room to get my word war on.

And then the next day I checked my internet usage (I only get 5GB a month! *GASP*) and about died when I saw that chatnano had used nearly a full gig. "There goes my hopes of literary chattage," I thought to myself, before breaking down to weep and gnash teeth.

I stumbled upon Chatzy, a pretty awesome chat program that used significantly less bandwidth and rejoiced! I got a few of my fellow Michigan NaNo-ers to join me in Chatzy on the days that they didn't meet for on chatnano for some word wars, like Erica with her character's bra with wings (really, a skimpy dress,) and then invited some friends from twitter to join in with us.

Of those were Kari, word war speed demon that would make anyone cry with her word counts that were usually double the rest of ours. We decided early on to congratulate her, but secretly she didn't count towards the real winner. I frequently had the lowest counts, but I had friends so it didn't matter.

Other friends came along, like Shelley, the resident romance guru who kept us late into the night with her sharing of Greyson and that girl firefighter and their, um... parts.

Brenda came along too, sharing bits (and whole copies) of her Library Jumpers book that took the group by storm, along with her owly BirdBoy.

The five of us really fell in together during November 2010. By months end, I really didn't want our lovely chat sessions and word wars to end, but end they did.  Revisions were to be had, as well as incoming family for the holiday. Funny thing, though, we all kept meeting in Chatzy. We'd share bits and news and encouragement and embarrassing stories... They didn't want our perfect little group to break up either!

And so, fast forward to January when a few of us were talking on Twitter. Janelle and Diana got curious about our cryptic tweets and so we welcomed them into the fold. It's like they were there all along.

Erica dubbed us Dumbledore's NaNo Army, and I shortened that to DNA, and thus the DNA writers were born.

~~~

C.A. Marshall is a freelance editor, lit agent intern, YA writer, and loves to play with her dog Mollie. She dreams of one day owning a small house near the water, preferably in England, with a shelf full of books she has written and has helped others to write. She is currently single. And unagented. She can be found in Emmett, MI and at camarshall.com