This weekend was my Drakeathon: an 8-hour livewriting marathon over two days to raise funds to help offset the costs of my diabetic kitty’s insulin, needles, and vet visits.

For 4 hours on Saturday & 4 on Sunday, I took prompts and wrote from them in a GoogleDoc open to anyone who donated.

I received $155 in donations, got 20 prompts from 16 people, 13 of whom donated.

(in sick kitty terms, this is one bottle of insulin and 100 syringes, or 6 visits to the vet, or 155 days of canned cat food).

Things I learned:
* I like livewriting. I really like it. If I could do all my writing in front of an audience, I think I would.
* GoogleDocs works, but it has its flaws. It’s not right there visible to everyone, which I think might draw more interest.
– Clarification 1: It’s not in everyone’s face the way LJ/Twitter are. Having a docslike thing on the webpage would be ideal.
– Clarification 2: the flaws are generally in the word processing features of googledocs.
– Why did I set this up as fake bullets and not real ones?
* (Something I knew already, but I’m not sure how to capitalize on best): Interest makes interest. If half of your Twitter Feed or F-list is talking about something, you’re more likely to be interested yourself.
* 4 hours at a sitting is too long, and midnight is too late.

Things that surprised me:
* I got less unpaid prompts (5, from 3 people) and more paid prompts (the other 15) than I thought I would. I expected a lot more little 50 or 100 word unpaid prompts and less 600+ word paid requests
* I write slower than I thought I would. I still have 2 unpaid & 4 paid requests to write in the next week, totally 3900 words (I wrote ~7000 words over 8 hours).
* People seem rather interested in what sort of pizza I’ll be getting with the $20 incentive level (probably take-out Indian. There’s no good delivery in East Nowhere where we live)
* It probably shouldn’t have surprised me, but I had quite a few Addergoole prompts (4, plus two in the wings that are “Addergoole /or/ Cali;” Addergoole is my webserial I’ve been posting for 2+ years) and none for the current fantasy short story setting, Reiassan.

All in all, I had a lot of fun. I’m excited to put together the e-book, as that will be another learning experience, and I will probably do this again at some point.

* Title changed from “postmortem” to indicate that the kitty in question is still alive and well!

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