By Chris Baty
Year One: Making some (not entirely horrible) noise
The very first NaNoWriMo took place in July, 1999, in the San Francisco Bay Area. That first year there were 21 of us, and our July noveling binge had little to do with any burning ambitions we might have harbored on the literary front. Nor did it reflect any hopes we had about tapping more fully into our creative selves. No, we wanted to write novels for the same dumb reasons twentysomethings start bands. Because we wanted to make noise. Because we didn't have anything better to do. And because we thought that, as novelists, we would have an easier time getting dates than we did as non-novelists.
So sad. But so, so true.
The first year's trials and tribulations are laid out in the introduction to No Plot? No Problem!, but the short version is that our novels, despite our questionable motives and pitiful experience, came out okay. Not great. But not horrible, either. And, more surprising than that, the writing process had been really, really fun.
Fun was something we hadn't expected. Pain? Sure. Embarrassment? Yes. Crippling self-doubt followed by a quiet distancing of ourselves from the entire project? You bet.
But fun? Fun was a revelation. Novel-writing, we had discovered, was just like watching TV. You get a bunch of friends together, load up on caffeine and junk food, and stare at a glowing screen for a couple hours. And a story spins itself out in front of you.
I think the scene---full of smack-talk and muffin crumbs on our keyboards---would have rightly horrified professional writers. We had taken the cloistered, agonized novel-writing process and transformed it into something that was half literary marathon and half block party.
We called it noveling. And after the noveling ended on August 1, my sense of what was possible for myself, and those around me, was forever changed. If my friends and I could write passable novels in a month, I knew, anyone could do it.
Which is how the whole thing really got rolling.
Year Two: Peaking early
The next year, a friend offered to build an actual website for the event. His plan to create a professional-ish looking site that could accommodate several hundred participants seemed overly ambitious, but I didn't want to discourage him because he was doing it for free. He built the site in time for the second NaNoWriMo, which had been moved to November to more fully take advantage of the miserable weather.
I sent out an email announcing the November start date and new NaNoWriMo.com URL to friends. Who, in turn, forwarded the invitation on to their friends. By November 1, we had 140 people participating, half of whom I didn't know, and most of whom lived outside of the Bay Area. Including some from Canada and places further afield. We had become international!
The event, I knew, was peaking. I was determined to make the most of our moment in the sun, though, and started adding some much-needed improvements to the site. The biggest of these was the NaNoWriMo Yahoo club I created, so participants spread out over a half-dozen cities could get to know each other.
The Yahoo club worked well on that front. But however helpful it was as a friend-finder, the message boards also started causing a few problems. Like when participants began posting some difficult questions. 'Are you allowed to quote from other works in your book and still have the words count towards your total word tally?' 'Can you write a 50,000-word poem?' And: 'What if the book is entirely autobiographical with a few names changed? Is that still fiction?' Serious debates ensued, and clarification of the rules was requested.
At first, I was flummoxed. Rules? Didn't these people know that the 'rules' had just been a loose aggregation of contradictory statements that I'd hurriedly pulled from my butt the previous year?
Who had time for namby-pamby rules? A literary revolution was afoot here, people! Write first! Ask questions later! A novel-writing tornado was ripping through our very heartlands! When a tornado is approaching, do you waste time pondering what rules may govern its mighty winds?
No! You take off all your clothes and hurl yourself directly into its maw, feeling the elemental forces course through your very soul. And you ride those explosive currents until you become the cyclone. All-powerful. All-knowing. Destroying everything in your path.
How long did I keep up the tornado talk before providing some guidelines?
About twenty minutes.
Because, from my years of work as an editor, I knew that having a set of unbendable rules and a merciless deadline was absolutely essential in giving writers the mental focus and shared sense of toil necessary to tackle daunting projects.
So Year Two was when most of NaNoWriMo's regulations were born.
Yes, you do have to start from scratch. No, you can't co-author a book. Yes, it has to be a novel (some of the first year's participants had worked on graphic novels and screenplays using an equivalency formula worked out in advance). And you are required to email your novel into headquarters by midnight, Pacific Time, at the end of the month for word-count verification purposes. Or it will be dismissed by the global governing council that oversees internet-based novel-writing events.
With the guidelines set in stone (and enforced by an invisible army of flying monkeys I had rented for the event), the second year came together smoothly. I sent out weekly pep talks in an effort to help acclimate first-timers to the strange climate of high-velocity novel-writing. And the Yahoo club was bursting with hilarious, empowering conversations and helpful hints. That year, 21 of the 140 people who signed up crossed the finish line, roughly mirroring the completion rates from the previous year.
Those who finished in time filled my Yahoo inbox with their novels, and I gleefully opened each manuscript and ceremoniously ran the word count function, rewarding each writer's Herculean efforts with a small star placed at the end of their NaNoWriMo progress bars.
Because we all needed a drink by the end of the month, those of us in the Bay Area organized a Thank God It's Over party at my friend Tim's house, running string throughout his kitchen so people could clothespin excerpts of their novels up for others to enjoy. At the party, participants who had known each other only by their screen-names met and talked and danced and threw peanut M&M's at each other. It was great. And things seemed enormously promising for the following year.
Year Three: The literary tornado touches down
To best understand the cataclysmic series of events that rained down on the third year of NaNoWriMo, you should read journalist Kara Platoni's blow-by-blow account that ran in the East Bay Express newspaper.
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/issues/2001-12-19/feature.html
It's a good, long story, the gist of which can be summed up in two sentences: I had been anticipating 150 participants. Five thousand showed up.
I blame it on the bloggers. Blogs, at that point, had yet to be discovered by the mainstream media, and I was pretty clueless about them as well. I knew of their existence, but I had no real sense of their power to drive massive amounts of traffic until NaNoWriMo began being hit by hundreds of pinpoint visitor-streams from websites I'd never heard of.
At first it was great. Watching NaNoWriMo's hit-counter spike as all these small web entities delivered yet another boatload of visitors to the NaNoWriMo site was truly a thrill. As sign-ups continued to increase---first to 200 then on towards 400---the amount of newcomers became a slight concern.
High turnout was awesome, but without any sort of automated sign-up system in place, getting each new user registered for NaNoWriMo took me about five minutes. And that wasn't counting any questions that participants may need answered.
With five days remaining until the event started, I was working 16 hours a day flinging names up on the participant page as fast as I could. Then inviting them to join the Yahoo group, and, in a separate operation, sending them a welcome email. As I fell ever-further behind, the rising tide of Wrimos went from fun to frightening. STOP THE BOATS! I wanted to scream at all our referring websites. TURN BACK! WE HAVE NO MORE CABANAS! OUR BEACHES ARE FULL! WE'RE MINING THE HARBORS!
But it was too late. The NaNo population leapt from 1000 to 2000. And that's when the newspaper articles began. NaNoWriMo got a wonderful write-up in the Los Angeles Times, which then lead to other pieces around the country. My mom was very proud, my friends were impressed, and the event was on the verge of collapse.
By the time sign-ups ended, the backlog of people waiting to be registered stood at over 3000.
Thankfully, that was when the cavalry arrived. My friends, many of whom had done NaNoWriMo the first year, came in to save the day. Bolstered by the redemptive power of caffeine and my friend Rolf's set of networked computers, we began all-night sign-up processing vigils, taking turns opening, alphabetizing, club-inviting, and lying comatose on the floor.
It was a rough start, and things just got worse from there. Most of us came down with RSI problems from the mousework, and those of us who had planned to write novels had our start slowed by wrist pains and a four-day late start from all the administrative work.
Adding to the gray mood, the site was unceremoniously hacked a few hours into the event, and soon thereafter our tiny web-host demanded we find a new home because we were so horribly over our bandwith allotment that we had begun stealing resources from other web sites on our server.
But we rode it out. And, thanks to the compassionate help of volunteers and participants, things got better. This was, in effect, the birth of the modern NaNoWriMo. Where every seemingly insurmountable problem was solved by a supportive community who stepped forward at just the right time to say: 'What do you need me to do?'
With the main Yahoo club disastrously overcrowded, individual participants set up regional message boards where participants could actually carry on a conversation. When, at the end of the month, I realized that having an official word-count validation would be impossible due to the numbers of potential winners, people just validated each other's novels.
It was a beautiful, organic system where everyone, including complete strangers, chipped in with solutions. And better still, everyone took care of each other. This, too, would come to be one of NaNoWriMo's greatest and most defining features. Friendly, funny writing support everywhere you turn.
In its three years, NaNoWriMo had become a new kind of writing group, one where it was okay to laugh at yourself and, more importantly, laugh at your shortcomings as a writer. With everyone aiming for completion rather than perfection, energy levels soared to new heights.
By the end of the third year, though, a new question had come up: Money. I had paid for the first and second NaNoWriMo's myself, but Year Three posed a dilemma. The web-hosting costs had doubled, and the work of running NaNoWriMo had meant I hadn't been able to take on any freelance writing assignments in October or November. Which left me in an awkward financial situation at the end of November.
On the last day of the event, I sent out a PayPal request for participants to help pay for the event by chipping in whatever they felt was fair. The mood at the close of that NaNoWriMo was triumphant, and I figured that if everyone who had gotten something worthwhile out of the adventure were to send in $1, I'd have more than enough to build a new automated site, pay the hosting bills, pay my own bills, and take all the year's volunteers out for a gigantic thank-you pizza.
This was the start of my education in running an event without a mandatory entry fee. The biggest lesson of which is this: When you make contributions voluntary, very few people volunteer to contribute. No matter how great a time they had or how much they believe in your cause, 90% of participants just won't find their way to clicking on the PayPal link or mailing in a couple dollars.
The karmic repercussions of it all were mind-boggling to me. Who were these monsters? I'd spent the last month staying up till 3 am every night patiently answering emails, offering encouragement, and giving up every ounce of love and support that the Red Bull hadn't leached from my body. And when I asked for one dollar in return, they turned a cold shoulder? Was this the definition of community?
I spent a week or so frozen in that bitter, martyred pose until a public radio fundraising drive brought me out of it. The baritone-voiced radio announcer was trying to interest me in yet another Newsweek-filled pledge package, and I was looking around to find something to throw at the stereo. Which was when I realized what was happening.
My god, I thought. I suckle at the teat of public radio all year, and I have never once sent them a dime. Never. And how often had I ever given anything to charities or organizations I believed in?
Crap.
Either I was a monster, or none of us were monsters. I did some quick calculations and decided, for the sake of my self-image, that none of us were monsters. We were just busy. With our hearts in the right places and way too much going on in our lives for us to always remember to support the institutions that made us happy.
That realization got me down off my cross, and improved my mood immensely. If I wanted to keep NaNoWriMo alive -- and free of ads and other annoyances -- I was going to have to work to communicate NaNoWriMo's needs better. Which meant I had a lot of work to do before the following November. And I set to doing it. Right after getting a Newsweek subscription courtesy of the local public radio station.
Year Four: The blessed new site brings robots to NaNoLand
Every few years, someone enters NaNoWriMo's orbit and raises the whole event up a few notches. Between years Three and Four, I was lucky enough to find Dan Sanderson. Who single-handedly wrenched NaNoWriMo into the 21st century.
Many of the site features you associate with NaNoWriMo were invented by Dan. Dan created the tantalizing candy-colored progress and winner bars. He wrote the novel-validation 'count and delete' computer script that allowed us to re-institute official novel verification. He customized the forums and somehow made an online home that easily accommodated the 14,000 people who signed up for NaNoWriMo IV.
For me, 2002 was all about the joy of having a fully automated, smoothly functioning site. That, and the painfully hilarious debacle of the t-shirts.
NaNoWriMo had sold t-shirts in tiny quantities and limited sizes in previous years. In 2002, though, I got carried away and decided that what the NaNo world really needed was 21 different combinations of sizes, styles, and logos.
The fact that I am easily confused, horrible at maintaining any sort of consistent organizational system, and prone to misplacing objects in very small spaces should have been a warning to me that processing and shipping so many items out of my living room was going to be a challenge.
But there are some lessons, apparently, you just have to learn the hard way. Which is why, when not answering emails, processing donations, writing pep talks, site text, or my own novel, I spent every waking moment of NaNoWriMo 2002 with the volunteer cavalry of friends, loading shirts one by one into a Tyvek mailers, carefully misaddressing them with a marker, and then making endless midnight rounds of postal drop boxes in Oakland, stuffing each poor blue box to the gills, and then moving on to the next box to repeat the process.
To the postal workers of Oakland: I'm sorry. And to everyone who ordered a shirt in 2002, I say this: Thank you for your boundless patience. If you got a shirt that even vaguely resembled your original order, you did much, much better than most people.
Sigh.
Happily, apart from the laugh-so-we-don't-cry t-shirt misadventures, and some initial technical glitches, the event was absolutely mind-blowing. And from a programming point of view, it kind of set a template for all our future plans: Build things against a ridiculous time deadline, and then, unencumbered by things like beta-testing, put them out there for thousands of people to use.
It's not the soundest of blueprints. But with a little calibration, it worked. And the new forums meant all participants could be in the same place again. Man! The forums! Watching the post numbers climb on the forums was like watching a small city build itself, from gate to spire, in a week's time. And as it had been in its more small-town days, the city was governed by the impossibly helpful rules of kindness, humor, and high-octane encouragement.
The mood was dynamic. And the growth was beyond anything I had ever imagined. This was also the year that media attention helped the event spread further. NPR's All Things Considered. CBS Evening News. Waking up in the middle of the night to talk to the BBC in Scotland. It was exhilarating and dumbfounding to watch this simple idea leap from computer to computer, country to country.
The finances of the event smoothed out in NaNoWriMo IV as well, and we raised enough money to pay for all our expenses without resorting to ads or sign-up fees. Things looked dandy for NaNoWriMo V. Which made me very nervous indeed.
Year Five: The ML Years + A Man Called Russ
As the escapade continued into its fifth year, I realized that the most important thing I could do for the longevity of the event was to help foster local NaNoWriMo chapters around the world. The NaNoWriMo.org site was useful and fun on a big-picture level, but a weekly pep talk from a disembodied voice in Oakland just wasn't adequate motivational pressure for someone living in Singapore or Saskatchewan. What really kept participants writing was the fear of humiliating themselves in front of a group of real live humans in their own post code. I was on a mission'
The previous year, I had created the position of Municipal Liaison, an officious-sounding title for the already-existing groups of volunteer NaNoWriMo chapter-heads in each town. These people -- with their dedication, their smarts, and their tender tough-love tactics -- blew me away back then, and they continue to today. They are the heart of NaNoWriMo, and they do amazing work for no pay, and deserve a huge, huge cake with lots of icing.
In lieu of cake, during NaNoWriMo's fourth year we had begun airlifting them NaNoWriMo stickers and pencils to help entice people to local meetings. In our fifth year, we continued with the stickers and pens, and added Lauren Ayer to our staff to be a point person for the MLs.
In 2003, I also hired the talented Julia Cardis to help with answering emails, processing donations, and overseeing t-shirt sales (the handling of which had been taken over by a fulfillment company in Ohio, mercifully far removed from my living room).
Relinquishing my death-grip on every aspect of the organization was hard, but by year five I had to admit I was teetering on the edge of burn-out, and having Julia's calm hand on the rudder helped me start sleeping again. Mmm...sleep.
That was also the year the formidable Russ Uman joined the tech staff as part-time computer overlord. Remember that thing earlier about someone coming along every few years to usher in a new era of technolgical know-how for the event? Russ was that guy---a friend of a friend who answered a desperate help-wanted email I sent asking if he could recommmend any freelance PHP programmers who might be able to start work yesterday.
Russ offered himself. I had no idea that taking him onboard would lead to a chain of events that would end up changing my life, and the NaNoWriMo event, forever.
But more about that in a second.
Some memorable moments from the 2003 yearbook:
*Kicking the event off by sending out the first pep talk email to 2000 people, rather than the 25,000 in the database. What we lacked in breadth of dispersal, though, we made up for in depth: The lucky recipients got the email sent to them 10 times. The unlucky received over 200 copies before we were able to overpower the confused mail server and shut it down.
*The Tony Danza excitement: Was it the Tony Danza participating? Only his agent knows for sure.
*Hearing that another NaNoWriMo winner had sold her manuscript to a big-time publisher.
*Emailing with a monk participating from India, who wondered if it would be okay if helpers updated his word counts for him because his internet access was unreliable.
*Waking up in late November to find that the novel-validator had turned itself on ten hours early and had already validated a hundred novels. The good news: It had added everyone to the winner's page without a hitch. The bad news: It had celebrated their accomplishment by sending them the winner icon and certificate from the year before. Doh.
Every year, another step closer to competence. I tell you...
Year Six: A new site and some new hopes
After the dust cleared on 2003, I sat down for awhile and made a list of the things that were critical to the future success of NaNoWriMo. These items included:
A hovercraft.
A cart that could be pulled by a team of miniature pot-bellied pigs.
A talking alarm clock.
A sandwich.
The list went on and on, but by the end of my ponderings, one item seemed more important than any other: A new website that would better reflect the color and energy of the event. A new site that would have photos of participants, and help MLs spread the word about local meetings more easily.
Enter Jeff Fassnacht, a San Francisco graphic designer who made these dreams a reality. (Well, some of the dreams anyway. Despite his facility with the graphic design world, Jeff turned out to be entirely useless on the pig-cart-acquisition front.)
But Jeff did an amazing job of fulfilling NaNoWriMo's every non-porcine need. From the running-man logo to the seductive light-blue curve-cornered rectangles, Jeff saw design solutions where I saw only lines and lines of confusing HTML code. And then Russ took the amazing skin Jeff had made, and concocted a muscly new site with well-toned database abs rippling beneath it.
We were expecting 40,000 participants to use Jeff and Russ' new site in 2004, and 42,000 writers showed up. To help keep everything running smoothly with the higher turnout, we added a few more great people to the staff page. Julia took on the responsibilities and formal dress code of a full-time office job after NaNoWriMo 2003, but we were lucky to snag the brilliant Hyland Baron to take over for her as Managing Director.
Ellen Martin arrived from whatever heavens birthed her to be our contact person for the growing number of teachers who have brought NaNoWriMo into their classrooms. And East Bay ML and NaNo veteran Erin Allday stepped up to the plate as the Daily NaNo Q&A section editor and Co-ML Headmistress.
The sixth year also marked the debut of NaNoWriMo's partnership with Room to Read, the international children's literacy program. I had been looking for an international organization that would help us do some bookish good in the world, and through a friend, I found Room to Read. A few weeks later, our Cambodian Libraries program was born. NaNoWriMo gave 50% of its net profits from 2004 to the program, raising over $7000 -- enough to establish and outfit children's libraries in three Cambodian villages.
On a personal level, NaNoWriMo 2004 was also interesting because I spent much of it on book tour. The year before, I had pitched a NaNoWriMo surival guide called "No Plot? No Problem!" to a literary agent. She liked the idea, and we ended up selling a book proposal for it to Chronicle Books (woo hoo!), who wanted the completed manuscript in early December (uh oh). So I had spent November 2003 writing a novel in a month while also writing a guide to writing a novel in a month. Which completely proved the NaNoWriMo maxim "the busier you are, the easier it is."
Anyway, when the book came out in November 2004, the publisher sent me out on a tour that gave me a chance to preach the high-velocity NaNoWriMo gospel (and work on my NaNo-novel) in a bunch of exciting places. I met MLs and wrote with local chapters and talked and typed my way through libraries, living rooms, bookstores and, most terrifyingly, writers conferences. As someone who had never published a novel of my own (or spent any time in ficiton-writing circles), I kept waiting for one of the conference volunteers to come wrestle me away from the podium when I got up to speak.
Thankfully, everyone was much too polite to wrestle me, and I even started getting a few hints that NaNoWriMo was slowly becoming a known entity in the the professional writing world. "I have all my students do NaNoWriMo," one college professor told me at a bookstore talk. At a dinner reception for a writing conference, I was stopped by a fellow presenter on my way in the door. "You saved me," she said. It turns out she was a writer who'd published her stories in the New Yorker when she was younger. But as the pressure mounted, she became too self-criticial to write. NaNoWriMo had made creating stories fun again, and she was at the conference to talk about a new collection of her work that had just been published.
While she talked, I kept trying to spot cameras hidden in the hummus platter. It felt like it had to be a practical joke. Real authors were doing NaNoWriMo?
Could the pig cart be far behind?
Year Seven: Warehouses, WrimoRadio, and Children Everywhere!
NaNoWriMo 2005 began much like NaNoWriMo 2004---with me hovering nervously behind Russ as he did incomprehensible code-y things on that black screen with the white text that computer programmers always use. We were a couple hours late in getting the site launched (see "island time," below). But finally things seemed ready, Russ waved his magic wand, and the site went live.
We watched the first folks show up in the forums. Initially, everything seemed brilliant. Sign-ups were functioning. The userlist was growing. But the site seemed a little slow. Then it got slower. Then it died entirely. Russ requested a server reboot from the folks in Pittsburg, PA who were hosting the site, and then NaNoWriMo.org came back up and we watched it die all over again.
"The database server is hosed," Russ said. We cried together.
Opening day crashes had been an annual tradition for NaNoWriMo for many years at that point. And long-time participants had begun asking the good question: If you know the servers are going to get overloaded on that first day, why don't you just get more servers?
I asked Russ this question in the weeks leading up to October 1, 2005, and he answered me in computer terms. But as he was talking, I envisioned his answer in corndogs. Let's say you're a corn dog chef, and you have a restaurant where 50 people a night come to have a nice glass of chardonnay and a breaded dog. But one day a year, National Corndog Day, 500 people come to your restaurant to partake in the goodness that is your corn dog. You love corn dogs and you love your patrons and you love NaCoDoDa so much that you want to invest in extra ovens to make sure that people don't have to wait forever for their dog on that high-volume day. But the extra ovens are expensive, and aren't used at all the other 364 days of the year. If you spend too much money on the extra ovens for that single day, you may not have enough money for rent, which means you would go out of business, which would mean no more corndogs for anyone. But if you don't spend enough money, NaCoDoDa will suck, and that would break your heart.
This was our dilemma. Russ had scaled us up to five servers at our host for the 2005 launch, but what we really needed was a dual-processor server and mulitple database servers that were properly "load balanced" and root access and a couple other boring technical things that would make a normal corndog-lover's eyes glaze over.
So Russ just turned off searches on the Forums and requested something called a php accelerator, and it was pretty okay from there on out, and we didn't crash once on November 1, which was a first for us. And I began a sneaky plan for a "stealth launch" in 2006 that would fix everything forever.
Meanwhile, we'd temporarily acquired a NaNoWriMo warehouse.
Do you remember all those NaNoWriMo t-shirts I'd talked about shipping off to a fulfillment warehouse in Ohio? Well, many of them were still there in the spring of 2005, when, in the spirit of completely forgetting past lessons learned, I decided to give the whole ship-it-ourselves operation a try again. So I had two palettes of shirts trucked back across the county to a warehouse space we were subletting. (Within two days of us getting our stuff back, the fulfillment house---iFulfill.com---declared bankruptcy and locked its doors with most of its clients merchandise trapped inside).
This time, with Russ' help, we got a great store operation going. And we ran it out of a converted warehouse space in a tough part of Oakland. The place was huge, with a modern kitchen, a French Press coffee maker, and a stylish stone bathroom. A 30'-long table made from a bowling alley lane took up most of the living room. It looked like the kind of place where a designer would live. And, in fact, it belonged to a genius Flash programmer who just happened to be going to live in rural France for October and November. The timing was perfect for us to fill the space with boxes, tape guns, and other accouterments of the packing lifestyle.
Less perfect was the fact that the Flash programmer who lived in the warehouse was the same person we'd hired to make our amazing brand-new Flash author profile pages. And he still hadn't finished them when he left for France in late September.
The new author profiles, complete with their elegantly turning pages, dynamic word-count, and writing buddy lists launched almost a week into November, setting a new record in NaNoWriMo's tendency to debut new features on "island time." Visually, they are the most beautiful thing I think the NaNoWriMo site will ever see. Implementation-wise, they took several years off my life and taught us a lot about working with people who make tables from bowling alleys.
The biggest hit of 2005 was our Young Writers Program. The YWP lives on a separate site, and YWP Director Ellen Martin grew the program to encompass over 150 schools and 4000 kids. In YWP, kids are able to set their own word count goals, but the hands-on, anything-goes approach to prose is the same. We sent classrooms participating in the event posters, stickers, and kid-friendly participant and winner certificates, and heard heaps of great stories of freshly minted nine-year-old novelists, school-sponsored teen noveling lock-ins, and wonderstruck English teachers who couldn't believe that the whole thing worked so well (or that school superintendents let them do it in the first place).
This was also the year when Sam Hallgren helped us realize our months-old dream of creating a NaNoWriMo podcast. Produced from Chicago (where Sam was living and working for This American Life at the time), WrimoRadio was our attempt to capture participants' voices and stories as they wrestled with their manuscripts and triumphed over their inner editors. From check-ins with our Forums Moderation Queen Cybele May to reports from the field by a high school correspondant whose school was taking the plunge together to readings of nano-novel excerpts from Ira Glass, Will Wheaton, and George Saunders, WrimoRadio felt like a tremendous step forward in making the site better represent the energy of the actual event.
After a terrifying mid-November donation lull in which it looked like we weren't going to have enough money to pay back our annual bank loan, we ended up raising $28,000 above our break-even point, and were able to give $14,000 to Room to Read to build seven libraries in Laos, and throw $14,000 in the bank for seed money.
From the numbers of participants, money raised, and general having-our-act-togetherness, it was the best NaNoWriMo ever. But there were some tough decisions to be made, all of which came quickly in 2006.
Year Eight: The Office
At the end of the 2005 event, NaNoWriMo was at a crossroads. We'd come farther and lasted longer than I'd ever imagined, but the scope of operations had become too big, the staffing situation too complex, and the risk for personal financial ruin too high. We either needed to take the next step of turning NaNoWriMo into a 501(c) (3) nonprofit and running it as a major part of a year-round endeavor, or we needed to stop doing it all together.
Not sure what to do, I went to Scotland for five weeks on an apartment exchange. My girlfriend and I loved Scottish living, especially listening to the BBC Radio Scotland every morning while sucking down Scottish coffee and toast. BBC Radio Scotland had been one of the first radio stations to do a piece on NaNoWriMo back in the early years, which is why I almost spit out my coffee one morning when I heard the announcer mention their "Write Here, Right Now" novel-in-a-month contest. The goal was to write a 28,000-word novel in February. You signed up for free at their website and got daily pep talk emails and...
Holy cow! Daily pep talk emails? We'd been beaten at our own game! And the programmers had Scottish accents, making the whole thing irresistable. Sam had tried to do an Irish accent once on WrimoRadio, but the results had been somehat questionable.
I was proud of the BBC for taking a good idea and inviting a whole country to do it. But it was kind of weird all the same, to be in a foreign place and hear NaNoWriMo on the radio, but with a different name, and a much more charming accent.
When I got back from Scotland, I felt fired up, and had a meeting with Ellen, who had since gone back to business school and become a nonprofit guru. And the subject of this meeting was: Exactly how much work would it be to make NaNoWriMo a 501(c)(3) charity? She gave me a long list of pros and cons, most of which involved more time and a dramatically biggened budget. It turns out that when you get all the right insurances, hire people properly, pay all the taxes and incorporation fees that come with creating and running a corporation, everything costs twice as much as it did when you ran the thing out of coffee shops.
But it's also a billion times as stable, and you get all sorts of fantastic things in the bargain. Like an office. And a board of directors. And a hulking, smooth-rolling set of lateral files donated by Hyland Baron to fill up with seven years of notes and clippings and dreams. And Ikea businessy furniture everywhere you turn.
Oh, Ikea. You make us feel like adults.
But I'm getting ahead of the story here.
That spring, we began the long march towards nonprofit incorporation. On our founding board of directors, we had corporate lawyer and very excellent dancer Eric Doherty, five-time NaNoWriMo winner and award-winning journalist Kara Platoni, five-time NaNoWriMo and computer guru Diane Reese, NaNoWriMo technical overlord and spreadsheet whiz Russ Uman, and former YWP director-turned-social-venture-maestro Ellen Martin.
The first thing we needed to do together: Name the thing.
My instinct was to call it "NaNoCorp," and that was a very bad instinct. We wanted the nonprofit to be able to run NaNoWriMo and a bunch of other events that had nothing to do with novels. We needed a new name that was encouraging and friendly, that implied creativity on a global scale, and that had a dash of whimsy, but not so much whimsy that foundations would worry that we were going to sneak off to Mexico to build sandcastles.
Discarded early candidates included: Imaginary Expeditions (too river-rafty), the Society for Creative Combustion (too close to Society for Creative Anachronism), Pants-Kickers, Inc. (too confusing), Exploding Writers (too exploding), and the Literary Wild (too nature parky).
Eventually, we winnowed the list down to four finalists:
- The Eureka Project
- International Letters and Light
- The Starting Line
- The Corporation for Public Letters
The Starting Line sounded like something that foundations had been funding for decades, which seemed like a good sign. But my favorite was International Letters and Light. Unfortunately, I was alone in my enthusiasm for the name. Ellen insisted it was missing a noun, and everyone else pointed out that it had a very unfortunate acronym.
I kept thinking about it. A day later, I got it. I called Ellen.
"The Office of Letters and Light," I said. "It's like a little glowing governmental bureaucracy staffed by elves."
"I like it," she said.
And that was it. Our lawyer worked with us on all the paperwork, and we sent it in with a $750 check in filing fees. Now all we had to do was wait.
In the meantime, I began reading everything I could about nonprofit creation, management, and finances. It was, in a word, terrifying. There was so much to learn, and so many ways to do things incorrectly. My previous nightmares of hackers and server explosions were immediately replaced by the fear that I would misfile our board meeting minutes and wake up to find that every single NaNoWriMo participant had become a ward of the State.
The office, though, came together beautifully. Tim Lohnes, who had won NaNoWriMo for the first six years of the event, had just launched a cartography company with another mapmaker. Lohnes + Wright GIS and Mapping were looking for an office in Oakland. The Office of Letters and Light was looking for an office in Oakland. We joined forces, and then Tim did all the work in finding the place. It was a match made in heaven.
The office Tim found still makes people oooh and ahh when they walk in the door. It's the former lobby of an ancient YMCA, and it's been converted into a large, sun-drenched room with 40' ceilings and wrap-around windows that look out onto a 24-hour Giant Burger and a welfare application support center. The area feels sketchy and deserted at night, but it's great during the day, and it's located next to two coffeeshops and the best shrimp burritos you can get without a shrimp burrito prescription.
When we picked up the keys to the new office, it felt like Tim, Bart, and I were in some sort of thirtysomething urban MasterCard ad. "Rent: $1100 per month. Alarm system: $30 per month. Being able to make baked potatoes in your own company's microwave while the police arrest someone outside: Priceless"
So we had an office that we loved. Now we really needed someone to help run it. As a year-round organization with an anticipated 80,000 participants, the Office of Letters and Light was going to need someone other than me to handle everything.
In August, 2006, I posted a Craigslist ad for a full-time Managing Editor. We received over 150 applications, and I interviewed a bunch of great candidates, but in the end it was all about Tavia Stewart. She was enthusiastic and tireless, with a great sense of humor and a degree in creative writing. Tavia was working at McSweeney's at the time, across the Bay in San Francisco. Within three weeks of accepting the job, Tavia gave up her San Francisco apartment, bought a car, and moved to Oakland.
This, for me, was a stomach-drop moment.
Here was a very nice person who had left a job at one of the country's coolest magazines to work for an organization that had $0 in guaranteed funding, no cash reserves, who had recently entertained the idea of calling itself Exploding Writers.
Up to that point, the idea of failure wasn't anything I'd given much thought to. If, God forbid, something catastrophic happened on the fundraising front, the eight or so people who did contract work for us had full-time jobs they could fall back on. I could return to freelancing. Russ would become a pirate. Things would be okay.
With Tavia coming on board too, that changed. Suddenly, NaNoWriMo's success was essential to rent and car payments and the ability to go home to visit families at Christmas. It made everything feel different. Not better or worse. Just a lot more serious.
I went home and stared at the wall. When did this happen? Between 1999 and 2006, I realized, I had somehow become an adult. One who hired full-time employees and picked out company health plans and went to seminars called "Philanthropic networking with banking institutions."
Of all of NaNoWriMo's weird twists and turns over the years, this may have been the strangest. And you know what? I absolutely loved it. Being an adult was much more interesting than not being an adult. The fact that my adulthood had arrived courtesy of an month-long novel-writing escapade just made it all the sweeter.
Tavia jumped in with both feet, and by September we'd lined up the top-notch staff of Erin Allday to run our Municipal Liaison program, Cybele May to moderate our forums, and Karlyn Pratt to direct our Young Writers Program. Russ was on the computer keys, as always. And when Sam Hallgren decided at the last minute that he couldn't produce WrimoRadio again, I happily took over podcasting duties.
Determined to make the most of our new office and year-round status, Tavia and I decided to dream big and start ordering our shipping supplies for NaNoWriMo 2006 in bulk. Over the course of a single NaNoWriMo, we tended to go through several thousand padded mailers, thousands of mailing labels, hundreds of boxes and poster tubes, several dozen rolls of tape, and about fifteen crates of bubble wrap.
So why not just order it all at once and be done with it, we thought. The downside of this strategy pulled up in front of the office a week later. The semi-truck was packed with towering palettes of cardboard, and rolls of bubblewrap the size of tractor tires.
The driver rang our doorbell.
"Loading dock?" he asked.
Tavia and I look at each other nervously.
He frowned, sensing his day was about to get much longer.
"You guys have a forklift, right?"
"We're a novel-writing nonprofit," we said, hoping that would explain our lack of a forklift. He grunted.
It took us several hours, but we eventually got all our stuff off the sidewalk and into the office. And on the eve of NaNoWriMo 2006, we were set. We had supplies. We had staff. And then we got the best news of all: The IRS approved our 501(c)(3) status.
The Office of Letters and Light was off and running.
On October 31, the staff had gathered in the office, poised to write our way into a new noveling year together. I kept nervously checking the NaNoWriMo site, which had been sluggish since BoingBoing.net had posted a link to us that morning. Under the heavy surge of participants in easterly time zones updating their word counts, along with the curious visitors who'd seen the link on BoingBoing, the NaNo site was timing out, which wasn't good.
Looking to take my mind off the site woes, I started putzing around on the internet. Where I saw something that made my jaw drop. The NaNoWriMo site had ended up somewhere it shouldn't have been. Top left corner. In a box marked "Featured."
"Oh, crap," I said. "We're on the front page of Yahoo."
By the time we'd disappeared from Yahoo front page 24 hours later, NaNoWriMo had grown by 7000 participants.
That year, the Young Writers Program experienced a similar surge (but without the help of a major search engine). It grew from 4,000 to 15,000 kids and teens. And colleges, too, had begun offering courses on the month-long novel. We got ecstatic updates from instructors at UCLA, Phoenix College, and George Mason University with tales of win rates as high as 90%, and students coming away from the experience absolutely on fire about books and writing.
The news from the publishing front was similarly bountiful. We were up to 13 manuscripts sold at that point, when we heard about Sara Gruen. Sara had been one of the first participants to sell her NaNoWriMo manuscript, and had since written a bestseller called Water For Elephants. When her new project went out for auction in the fall of '06, she landed a reported $5.2 million, two-book deal. How did she celebrate? She sat down and wrote one of books during NaNoWriMo.
As November drew to a close, we had our annual heart-stopping run in with fundraising shortfalls. But in the last day, we crossed the break-even point, and then sailed past it, raising an additional $44,600 in profit. This meant we had $22,300 to give to Room to Read for seven libraries in Vietnam.
It was, in retrospect, a hard NaNoWriMo to let go of. I had written one of my favorite novels. The staff had worked great together. The question, as always, was how to keep some of the creative momentum of NaNoWriMo alive into the off-season.
So I emailed out a challenge with the final NaNo pep talk: Let's spend 2007 pursuing one of the big, fun, scary things we've always wanted to do, but haven’t yet gotten around to pursuing. We'd post updates on our progress in the forums, and cheer each other on as we checked off an item or two from our lifetime to-do lists.
The Year of Big, Fun, Scary Adventures ended up taking over the forums. For my part, I learned rudimentary Spanish. Other people bought cellos, took painting classes, came out to their parents, went back to college, started businesses, ran marathons, rewrote their novels, and submitted stories to all sorts of scary publishers and literary magazines. It was fantastic. Combine a deadline with a supportive community, and great stuff will happen every time.
We sailed into the spring in a blissful, can-do state, completely unaware that some serious storm clouds were gathering on the horizon.
