Breaking News

First off, we're sorry the site was down for an hour this afternoon. Sam says it was his fault, but Russ is trying to take some of the credit for breaking it too. We're too busy being excited about the upcoming November 15th Night of Writing Dangerously Write-a-thon to play the blame game. (Just between you and me, I blame Sam.)

But back to the Night of Writing Dangerously. If you haven't already bought your plane ticket to come to San Francisco for it, you need to do so now. Not just because you get a great dinner and a chance to win heaps of prizes, like new laptops and iPods and a baseball signed by Judy Blume. And not because you get unlimited caffeine and wine and candy and five hours of noveling time with a ballroom full of NaNoWriMo staff and participants. And not just because the night is a huge fundraiser for NaNoWriMo and the Young Writers Program.

No, you need to come because I'm going to be standing up during dinner and giving a talk about 10 years of NaNoWriMo, illustrated with lots of embarrassing photos, and I'm already nervous about it, and could use a lot of moral support.

Yes? Good. Try Orbitz. We'll see you at the SomArts Center.

Thanking you in advance for your calming presence at this exciting event,

Chris
Write-a-thon Speakers Bureau

Thanks to everyone for your help in getting new regions and MLs in place! I've got a wicked kink in my neck and can't stop thinking about pithy region descriptions, but it is all worth it. The hundreds of regions, new and old, are well-covered with enthusiastic and experienced Wrimos, and NaNoWriMo has infiltrated parts of the planet never before conquered by this wordy month. We now have chapters in Micronesia and Moscow!

The time has come to start getting all these regions organized for November, so this will be the last weekend we're accepting Prospective ML Forms. On Monday, I will take down the links on the Becoming a Municipal Liaison page until next year, when we do it all over again.

Naturally, there is still quite a bit of nipping and tucking left to do on the existing regions. If it still doesn't look quite right, don't fret! Just shoot me an email and we'll set it straight.

Thanks,
Lindsey
NaNoWriMo

Hey there! It's only the first week of October, and almost 20,000 participants have already signed up for NaNoWriMo! Oh, this is going to be a sweet, sweet 10th-anniversary year.

So we're working on a ton of things here at headquarters that I wanted to share with you. And because long lists of tech things we're working on are never really all that exciting to anyone but me, I’m stealing the little clock-bullets from the Procrastination Station to spice things up a little bit. Look! Clock-bullets!

A list of things we're working on:

• Bringing our fallen server comrade Lekempti back online with his shiny new disk. Double servers=double fun. And we can turn on long-neglected Forums search!
• Installing a new super-cool headers for the Regional Lounges that will pop your eyeballs and explode your brain (in a good way).
• Translations! We have our translator army working on bringing the site up to date in four non-English languages.
• Easing the constrictions in the global credit markets, with an emphasis on addressing the growing crisis in commercial paper.
• Fixing widgets. We'll be applying a code fix from creator Paul Hawke soon.
• Clock-bullets! I can't stop using these things.

Stopping with the clock-bullets now,

Chris
NaNoWriMo

ps: If you're going to be anywhere near the Bay Area this Saturday, Tavia and I will be reading as part of a NaNoWriMo-themed event at the Litcrawl. We're on at 8:30 at the Lone Palm bar in San Francisco's Mission District. It's free! Come join us!

Okay! The single server seems to be handling the traffic really well, and the Young Writers Program site is back up in full effect. Hooray! The NaNoWriMo blog will be back online on Monday with some important photos of staff wearing cardboard tubes on their arms.

Whew! What a week! Thanks so much to Sam and Russ for saving the day. And a special thanks to everyone who donated this summer in our Help Our Servers fundraising drive. The only reason we were able to be back up so quickly after the disk failure is because you guys donated enough money for us to have an extra mega-server on hand. That server ended up being more important than we could have ever imagined. We hug you!

Have a great weekend, everyone! And a warm welcome to all our first-time participants!

Unable to stop using exclamation points because I've eaten nineteen peanut butter cups in the last three minutes,

Chris
NaNoWriMo

Hey there! We sadly lost one of our big database servers to disk failure on October 1 eve. We're working with our webhosts to bring it back online in the next four or five days, but the NaNoshow must go on! We spent the last 24 hours reconfiguring everything so we could try to relaunch with one database server instead of two.

Also, we're sad to say that the disk dying meant we lost a day's worth of new accounts and posts. Our most recent back-up was 9/30 at 1:15 AM. So if you created an account or made any changes after then, they've been lost and will need to be redone.

With only half our database arsenal in place, the site will be extremely slow, and the solitary database server may not be able to handle the load, in which case we'll need to take the site down until both big-gun database servers can work as a team again. But it was killing us to be dark in October, and we'd rather be slow (with occasional weird 'Cannot connect to database' errors) than not have anything up at all.

If you're just browsing the site, you can help keep the load on our database lighter by only signing in when you're ready to post something. Clicking on the "Customize Forums" link on your My NaNoWriMo page and unchecking forums you don't want to read will also save us precious data cycles.

Something not working right? Post a report about it in our bug reports forum!

Thanks for your patience everyone! This has been the less-fun kind of rollercoaster ride, but we'll get through it. And we're so, so excited about November!

Chris
NaNoWriMo

Welcome to NaNoWriMo's 10th birthday celebration!

We sneakily re-launched early so we could have extra time for things to break and get fixed (and then break again in exciting ways). Something not working right? Post a report about it in our bug reports forum! The site will be super-wonky for a bit while it finds its footing and the new servers settle

As you can see from our NaNo Q&A with Cybele, we've been busy this spring getting a bunch of cool improvements in place for NaNoWriMo's 10th anniversary. To help us pull everything off, we're looking to hire experienced Drupal programmers to do a few exciting projects for both NaNoWriMo.org and the brand-new NaNo Young Writers Program site. Know any level 80 Drupal wizards? Have 'em check out our job listing and get in touch!

And speaking of the brand-new Young Writers Program site! Next week's NaNo Q&A will be with Todd Blank, the web designer who's been tasked with the awesome responsibility of bringing our YWP hopes and dreams into vivid, pixel-y life. Todd has finalized the look of the new YWP home page, and we'll give you a sneak peak when we run his Q&A. The thing will make you cry and bang your head against something, it's so nice.

Crying and banging my head in eager anticipation,

Chris

Can I just say THANK YOU to everyone who has been using Goodsearch on our behalf? When we first heard about it, it seemed too good to be true. But lo and behold, we got our first check from them last fall. We'll be getting another check for over $1000 (!) this fall, which will have a huge impact on what we're able to do for NaNoWriMo.

If you've been part of our Goodsearch army, we can't thank you enough. If you haven't tried Goodsearch yet, please give it a shot! If enough folks do it, we could end up paying for some cool new NaNoWriMo features entirely through search funds.

Thanks again, everyone!

Chris
NaNoWriMo

ps: I'm halfway through a rewrite of my 2006 NaNo novel and I'm loving and hating it. Anyone else having turbulent times in rewriteland? NaNoMail me. Let's commiserate.

I wanted to give everyone advance warning that the second-annual Script Frenzy will be commencing on April 1. We've moved it up two months, and opened it up to more writers. Now, in addition to original feature-length screenplays and stage plays, the escapade includes adaptations of novels, short film scripts, graphic novel and comic book scripts, and even radio dramas.. As long as you cumulatively write 100 pages of script in April, you're a winner.

If you've been thinking that one of your NaNoWriMo manuscripts would make an awesome movie or play, April is the ideal month to find out. I wrote my first screenplay for Script Frenzy last year, and learning to tell a big story using only dialogue ended up paying big dividends in my novel-writing as well. I'd say Script Frenzy made my novel dialogue and pacing 349% less sucky overall, bringing both of them all the way up to a third-grade level.

Sweet progress.

I was also pleasantly surprised by how easy the dreaded formatting turned out to be, and how many great pieces of free scriptwriting software there are out there to automate the whole process. Here's to a heavily scripted April!

Chris