Breaking News

That's t-minus two days 'till noveling!

We've been getting a lot of emails from 2008 participants asking how to update the 2008 participant/win status on their Author Profile. It's easy! Just log into the site and go to Author Info (under My NaNoWriMo). Scroll down until you see the boxes where you can set Years Done/Years Won, and click on 2008 in the "done" area. If you won in 2008, click on 2008 in the "won" area as well.

If you'd like to select multiple Years Done or Years Won on a PC, hold down the "Ctrl" button while clicking. On a Mac, you hold down the "Command" button while clicking.

Presto! NaNoWriMo participation record complete! Next year, we may see if we can automate this, but for now it's on the honor system.

Chris

Four days? Four days!

We just added author number 86,724 to the Roster of Champions, and signed up our 1,100th Young Writers Program classroom!

And speaking of geeky numbers...Today I was looking at our Google Analytics page, and grabbed some stats for NaNoWriMo visits over the past month, broken down by country. There were some real surprises on the list, but nothing quite as surprising as what I saw when I ran the breakdown of visitors by city. (London, you have been spending a lot of time in our forums.) I'll try to post the city list tomorrow!

Sorry for the lack of formatting---I just grabbed it from the spreadsheet.

Top 50 Countries/Territories, Ranked by Visits

United States 673,795
UK 83,107
Canada 71,940
Australia 35,175
Germany 16,267
Netherlands 13,746
Finland 7679
Sweden 7192
France 5910
New Zealand 5792
(not set) 5047
Ireland 4556
Philippines 3768
India 3115
Japan 2932
South Africa 2746
Singapore 2730
Norway 2519
Spain 2325
Denmark 2129
Belgium 2120
South Korea 1812
Austria 1810
Malaysia 1758
Switzerland 1667
Mexico 1651
Italy 1633
Israel 1396
Portugal 1245
Brazil 1125
Indonesia 1100
Hungary 1055
China 1049
Romania 1010
Poland 772
Turkey 754
Russia 712
Latvia 671
Hong Kong 663
Argentina 612
Puerto Rico 538
United Arab Emirates 507
Greece 449
Estonia 438
Chile 401
Czech Republic 370
Thailand 289
Malta 284
Saudi Arabia 275
Croatia 256

And that concludes this geographic nerd-out! Happy Wednesday, everyone!

Chris

A couple things!

1) This time next week, we will all be noveling. It boggles the mind.

2) If you are teaching a NaNoWriMo-related class to adults (at a university, adult school, community center, etc.) would you mind dropping us a line? We've put together some free resources for you, and would love to get them to you and hear more about your class!

3) We're over 10% of the way to our fundraising goal for the year! Thank you donors! As detailed on the Donating When Broke page, one of the easy ways you can help NaNoWriMo and the Young Writers Program is to use the Yahoo-powered GoodSearch. Last year, we raised over $2,000 just from GoodSearchers! Help your online novel research pay off for both you and NaNoWriMo! We're setting an ambitious goal of raising $1000 in November from GoodSearch. We're all GoodSearching here in the office! Please join us!

78,000 authors and counting!

Chris

Holy buckets!

It's the last full weekend before NaNoWriMo begins, and I'm still coming to terms with what happens when your hard drive dies. Aieeeeyyye! I don't usually declare National Back Up Your Novel day until the first week of November, but please: Take this weekend and back up that computer! Mozy. Dropbox. Fourteen key chain thumbdrives you bought at that strange guy's garage sale down the street. It doesn't matter. However you do it, back up those novel notes. And vacation photos! And fonts! And songs!

And while I'm offering some bossy advice:

1) Be sure to plan to go to your area's NaNoWriMo kick-off party or November 1 midnight write in! To find out about NaNo get-togethers in your area, sign into the NaNo site and head to the My Regions page. Affiliate with the region closest to you, then visit the NaNo forums and scroll down to the very bottom, where your new Regional Lounge awaits!

2) Recruit some noveling co-conspirators. One of the surest ways to get to 50K is to charm or threaten your friends and family into taking the NaNoWriMo plunge alongside you. Misery loves company! And there's nothing like seeing your mother outpacing your word count to spur you on to new heights of productivity.

3) Go on a plot walk! It may seem like a waste of time, but trust me: Heading out rambling for an hour or so this weekend with a notebook and pen is a great way to feed your imagination and further (or start!) your story. If it's too cold for a walk where you live, go for a drive. If it's snowing too much to drive, lie on the floor and eat chocolate. That also helps.

Have a great weekend, everyone! We're at 71,285 authors and counting, a new NaNoWriMo record for this point in October!

Having trouble controlling the exclamation points,

Chris
NaNoWriMo

Okay! We just sent out the reminder email to last year's participants, and we're starting to see our annual spike in sign-ups. (Hello, returning Wrimos! It's so good to have you back!)

Wandering around NaNoland, things look pretty great. We just filled in our first book on the Fund-o-meter (thank you, donors!). Sign-ups are up 10% from last year. Over on the NaNo blog, folks are putting in guesses about this year's turn-out and first-timers are sharing why they decided to take part in NaNoWriMo this year. In the forums, we're swapping tattoo stories. And I, for the first time in my NaNoWriMo life, have accidentally discovered a reasonably unhorrible plot 11 full days before the event begins.

Eleven days!

Random note: If anyone out there was involved in mall development in the 1980s (or works for a shopping mall developer now), could you get in touch with me through NaNoMail?

Ah, October. It's a pretty wonderful time.

Just a week and a half until lift-off!

Chris

The cottony drought is over! Our screenprinters just dropped off hundreds more NaNoWriMo hoodies and 2009 NaNo tees in almost all sizes.

On Monday, we'll be sending out emails to 90,000 NaNoWriMo participants from previous years, inviting them to come back and bash out another month-long masterwork with us. (If you just arrived here after getting that email, welcome home!) Dan just added two more webservers to help make room for everyone, but we'll still likely see a temporary slowness on the site over the next week as folks settle in.

Have a great weekend, everyone. Just three more Saturdays until the noveling begins!

Chris

Many things!

I'm getting crazy excited about the "30 Covers, 30 Days" project. Where one small graphic design company in New York will be attempting to create a cover for a different NaNoWriMo novel-in-progress every day in November (all while maintaining their demanding workload of paying clients).

Will the task kill them? Maybe. Will it be worth it? You better believe it.

We just posted a new set of 2009 blog badges for folks who can't novel with us this year, but who still want to charm their friends, family, and enemies into taking the plunge. The new badges are hiding underneath the participant badges.

This isn't really as exciting as the previous two items, but did you know you can make NaNoWriMo forums you never look at disappear entirely? It's easy! And it saves us database cycles! Just go to Customize Forums under "My NaNoWriMo" and let the site's robotic hamsters know which forums you would like to see. They will obey.

Loving these heartwarming glimpses of YWP spreading around the world,

Chris

Hi Wrimos!

Now that you've signed up for a noveling November, here are three tips for getting your settings right and your profile straight:

1. Update years done and won: Go to My NaNoWriMo and select Edit Author Info. Select 2008 from the "Years Done NaNoWriMo" drop-down menu. If you won in 2008, be sure to select the same from the "Years Won NaNoWriMo" menu below it.

2. Set your time zone: Go to My NaNoWriMo and select Edit User Settings. Scroll down to Locale Settings/Time zone. Find the date and time where you are (it is listed in military time!) and hit "submit" at the bottom of the page.

3. Select your "home" region: Go to My NaNoWriMo and select My Regions. The Regions tab lets you affiliate with any of the NaNoWriMo regions around the world. Once you've affiliated with your region or regions, you should pick one of them to be your home region on the Home Region tab. There's truly no place like home.

Well done! Now you're extra-prepared for the wordy challenge to come.

Lindsey

After four days of sign-ups, we have 15,363 brave and crazy souls dedicating their Novembers to the high-velocity noveling arts.

If you're ever curious about the current population of NaNoLand, you can just sign in to the site, and head to the Authors Search page. Leave all those fields blank, and click on the "Search" button. Presto! You'll see a list of everyone who has signed up.

Hanging out on the Author Search page is sadly one of my greatest hobbies in October and November. I just searched again, and we're now up to 15,421 participants!

Thanks to some search magic implemented by Dan this year, you can also get a list of people writing in your genre who also live in your home region, find all the Wrimos in your age group writing this year, and discover exactly how many people joined JediDiplomat in listing James and the Giant Peach as one of their favorite novels. (Answer: 334.)

The Author Search will get even cooler on November 1, when we add word count!

Now at 15,709 participants,

Chris

It's great to have everyone back!

As you may have noticed, today we're experiencing some "site unavailable" issues. We're working on resolving it. Don't worry, your profiles, settings, and posts are all safe.

The good news is that we're using a new hosting system with scalable servers and we can add more capacity at the drop of a hat (as long as "by the drop of a hat" you mean a hat that takes an hour or so to land). The next week or so are going to be a good test of the new systems and our expected site loads. We're going to be tooling and tweaking those demands as we go along so that things will go smoothly come November 1st.

So please bear with us for the next few days as we work to get things up and working peak efficiency.

We'll try to keep things updated on our twitter feed, so if you do get an unavailable message, we'll be keeping folks informed over there.

Cybele
Site Wrangler