Wow! You guys rocked today!
We had around 15 people show up off and on during the day. That was awesome; thank you for coming! A number of people said they'd gotten at least two if not more days' worth of words banked up. That's excellent! The more words you can rack up early in the month the more invested you'll be in your story and the more likely you'll be to keep writing and finish.
The regional word count hasn't updated yet-- the website has been pretty heavily slammed -- but from what people said they'd completed this afternoon I feel pretty comfortable saying we're over 40,000 words as a region. So together, we've practically written a novel already!
(And that doesn't put us too far behind Perth... they're at 49,000. Don't know about Nevada, they haven't updated yet either.)
MANY thanks to the patience of you who showed up in the morning. I don't know how I got my wires crossed that badly on our start time. I tried to post something to warn people but when I saw there was a 14-hour delay in messages being posted I gave up. I hope I distributed enough sugar to sweeten that snafu for everyone.
By the way, widgets aren't working yet. They were causing some system instability so they've not been turned on. The website itself is being hammered by people excited to post their word counts, so have patience during the first week of November. And keep writing!
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Remember -- no matter how many or how few words bleed from your fingertips, by Nov. 30 you'll have written more of a a novel than most people write in a lifetime. Keep writing! Because darn it, it's fun!
