Breaking News

After the United States Postal Service servers went down this morning (making it impossible for our store to process shipping rates and thus take orders), we became concerned, and ultimately our tech man Sam decided to dispatch a goodwill band of Office of Letters and Light ninjas to the Postal Castle to see if they could be of service.

And apparently they were! The USPS servers just came back online, which means that our ninjas convinced the Postal Queen to reconnect her servers, and our store is once again ready to dispense beautiful NaNoWriMo tees, travel mugs, and donor thank-you gifts, just in time for the holidays.

Yay, ninjas!

Worrying Sam might be dumbing down his tech explanations to me a little too much these days,

Chris

UPDATE: The United States Postal Service's servers are still down, which means our store---along with hundreds of others around the country---can't look up the postal rates it needs to work properly. The USPS was forecasting "end of business day Monday" for a fix, but they're still down. Waaah. Donations work, but it's looking like it may be Tuesday before merch orders will be back. Which is sad, because another shipment of mugs just got here! As did....something exciting that I'm not supposed to talk about just yet.

This morning we woke to find that our store is having trouble finding shipping methods for your orders.

After all the action it’s seen in the past couple months, I figure it cuddled up in a warm virtual blanket for a little nap. Hopefully, it’ll just need a little prodding and a huge cup of coffee before it’s back up and ready to take your orders.

All tech hands are on deck to fix this problem as soon as possible. Once it’s fixed, we’ll post another Breaking News to let you know!

Your friend,
Tavia

Drop by the NaNoWriMo blog for Emily Bristow's announcement on NaNoWriMo 2008's top fundraising regions! Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this year's event, whether by volunteering your time and talent, donating, or sending encouraging words and suggestions our way. You are, quite simply, the best!

Lindsey
Community Liaison

Note: The United States Postal Service is still having server troubles, which is in turn making our postage-calculation and address look-up not work in the store. This does not affect donations, though! Thanks for your patience, and feel free to visit our Donation Station while the store is on hold!

So these past four days I've been feeling what I think a lot of Wrimos are feeling: Weird.

It's strange to have my evenings free for non-noveling chores. Yesterday night, I went grocery shopping for the first time in weeks, and my attention kept gravitating to high-energy, easily scarfable foods that wouldn't leave an oily trail on my keyboard.

"I can eat like a normal person now," I realized.

It was a discomforting thought.

If you've been fighting to post-NaNo blues this week too, never fear: There's a bunch of great stuff on the NaNo horizon. This week and weekend, there are tons of Thank God It's Over parties around the world to attend, where you can celebrate with your fellow Wrimos. We're having our Pan-Bay Area TGIO on Friday night at 8 PM in San Francisco at Root Division. Check your regional lounge for details of your local fest!

We'll be putting up a new WrimoRadio of 2008 on Monday, and next week I'll be sending out an email with some thoughts on this year and the adventures ahead. Big, Fun, Scary, ahoy!

Still eyeing those scarfables,

Chris

Thanks so much to all our donors who have chipped in over the past few days! We've received donations from almost 7% of our participants, and we're so, so grateful for the support. Still, we've got a long ways to go before we have enough money to launch NaNoWriMo and the Young Writers Program in 2009.

I really can't stress this enough. Getting NaNoWriMo and the Young Writers Program ready for an October 1 launch means we need to have our tiny-but-mighty crew working in the early spring, and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on technology, supplemental staff, printing, rent, and heaps of other costs.

Next year will be more expensive than this year. We want to invest in a dedicated, part-time tech guru to build new features and integrate more servers into our arsenal. We want to create and install more inspiring activities and word-coaxing functions on the site. We want to curate more pep talks, and provide community-fostering resources to 600 NaNoWriMo chapters around the world. We want to invest in a grantwriter to broaden our foundational funding base. We want to professionalize our curriculum for the Young Writers Program, and forever change the way 50,000 kids and teens see their creative potential.

To do any of this, we need your help. Please make a tax-deductible donation today and help us light up another book on that beautiful fund-o-meter!

We've moved from preliminary stats to close-to-final numbers for words and winners in 2008. The Word Count Scoreboard now includes all the words written in the final hours of the event. With that bump, the total collective word count now stands at (gasp!) 1,643,343,993 words.

Over on the I Wrote A Novel, Now What? page, the CreateSpace free proof copy codes are live for 2008 winners. If you're signed in and a winner, you'll see your code on the page now! We also added some rewriting advice from Sara Gruen, who will soon be putting all of us in her movie. Hooray!

Chris

The numbers will shift by a tiny bit over the next few days, but the stats are mostly in. And it looks like we just did something we've never done before.

Come by the blog and leave your thoughts on what happened!

Chris

Woo hoo! Congratulations, everyone!

My brain is a little spongy, so instead of writing a long Breaking News laying out the exciting stuff coming up this week, I set up a microphone and recorded an impromptu midnight episode of WrimoRadio.

In case you don't get a chance to listen: The "I Wrote a Novel, Now What?" page will go up around noon, Pacific on Monday. I'll also be back with some stats on winners and our collective word counts. (If you had trouble validating, get in touch! We'll help you get purple.)

Right now: The great December and Beyond forums are live! Novel swaps! Revision tips! Ideas on surviving the post-NaNo blues!

What a month.

A huge thanks to Lindsey, Tavia, Cybele, Russ, Sam, Heather, Bradford, Erin, Jen, Elizabeth, Diane, Drew, Emily, and all our great interns for their hard work in this record-setting year.

More tomorrow!

Chris

If you are still writing, we believe in you.

If you have a crazy, impossible dream of seeing this thing through, we believe in you.

We're waiting at the finish line, cheering and screaming and counting the minutes until we see you round that final corner.

Just a little further, and you're home.

Chris
NaNoWriMo

We've almost run out of November in Australia and New Zealand! To our friends down under: Write your pants off! We're rooting for you!

We sent out an email yesterday asking for folks who had gotten something out of NaNoWriMo to make a donation and give something back. So many generous folks responded to the call that it was hard to get through to the Donation Station this morning. Things are speedy in the Donation Station again now, and we've raised $18,000 since yesterday, pushing us up to a 6% donation rate, and getting us so, so close to paying all our 2008 bills for NaNo and the YWP.

Thanks to all the SuperWrimos who donated! If you tried to donate and found the check-out line too long, come on back! We need you. We hug you.

Finally, I got over 100 responses to my request to help me put 1.5 billion words—the amount I'm hoping we'll collectively write this November—into perspective. They were so brilliant, that I'm going to collect them for a blog post in the first week of December.

To give you a taste of their genius, here are the first three I received.

1.5 billion words would…

--Fill 2,678 copies of War and Peace. Since Amazon lists the tome as weighing 1.6 lbs, so that's roughly 4.3 tons of words. (wolfcaroling)

--Weigh as much as 38 baby elephants (4500 kg). Assuming they're as ferocious as baby elephants, they would surely beat that ninja army. Anyway, if they were put in a massive stack, they would be as tall as the Empire State Building (not including the spire) and taller than the Eiffel Tower, at 390m of pure books. (mangocheesecake)

--Go approximately the distance from Chicago to Los Angeles (if every word was as short as the letter "a") and go around the entire circumference of the earth twice (if every word were as long as "antidisestablishmentarianism") (Thatssorich66)

Still hugging you,

Chris
NaNoWriMo Winner 2008

We're headed into the final weekend of NaNo 2008! If you signed up for the Friday Before Bedtime Mini-Challenge and made your 45K or 50K, congratulations! I spent this week watching word counts shoot up across the site, and was floored by all the progress people made in such a short amount of time.

The Thanksgiving burden of consuming many kinds of delicious pies distracted me from my challenge goal of hitting 50K by bedtime tonight. But I'm at 46,500, and will win tomorrow. Barring a second onset of Thanksgiving, which seems unlikely.

Sigh.

A few important items:

1) The Friday episode of WrimoRadio got bumped back a day so Diane and I could have Thanksgiving off. It'll go up tomorrow and feature an interview I did with NaNoWriMo winner Sara Gruen, who I cajoled into promising us all roles in the Hollywood adaptation of her NaNoWriMo novel, Water for Elephants.

2) Please make sure your time zone is set correctly under My NaNoWriMo-->User Settings. Yeah, I'm a broken record about this. But the time-zone setting tells the word count validator when to go away, and we don't want to rob you of a single second of validation time.

3) If you win early, please validate early! Every year, thousands of people cross to 50K on Saturday or early Sunday morning, and decide to wait until Sunday night to validate. Then they lose track of time and sprint off to validate at 11:59 PM and find their cat is on the computer and in the middle of some gnarly World of Warcraft guild raid and is way-grumpy and ridiculously slow about closing out of the game. By the time they load the NaNoWriMo site, the validator is shut and sadness ensues. If you have 50K, you can validate now and continue to update your word count until 11:59:59 PM local time on November 30th. Do it! It's nice being purple.

4) As of right now, we've collectively written 1,322,650,718 words. This beats last year's total collective word count of 1,187,931,929 and we still have two days of writing left! Take that, 2007! Is it possible we might see 1.5 billion words written this month?

5) Seriously. 1.5 billion words? Amazing! Please: Someone do a mind-blowing, perspective-bringing calculation of what 1.5 billion words would mean, and NaNoMail it to me and I'll post it on the Breaking News tomorrow. Would 1.5 billion words stretch to Jupiter and back? Weigh more than France? Out-grapple a ninja? We want to know!

Have a great last weekend everyone! Let's get to 1.5 billion!

Chris