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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

Welcome to the eleventh-annual NaNoWriMo! Thanks to Dan Duvall's back-to-back all-nighters, and the staff's growing predilection for sugar-free Red Bull, noveling season has now officially opened!

As always post-launch, there are hundred little things on the site that are miscoded, broken, confused, angry, or lost. If you see some wayward web bits or encounter any orphaned text, please let us know over in the Tech Help and Site Bug Reports forum. Our team of bug squishers (and by "team," we mean the slightly delirious Dan) are standing by!

If you haven't already, check out the news about us moving to a brand-new server system this year. Dan will be fine-tuning the clouds over the coming weeks to get everything in speedy shape for November 1.

Hooray! We're so glad you're here!

See you in the forums!

Chris
NaNoWriMo

We are gathering testimonials from library staff members that have hosted NaNoWriMo or YWP events in their library. We're rolling out a library outreach program this fall, and your input will go a long way towards wooing the folks at these fine institutions.

If you’re able to contribute a short overview of your experience, please let us know by June 26, and we will get in touch with more information.

Thanks to everyone who sent in a photograph of your writing space! These snapshots of your writing lives are better than any of us here at headquarters could have ever imagined. Keep them coming!

Eleven minutes ‘til the weekend!

Lindsey

We broke ground this week on all kinds of exciting improvements to the site and store. Many thanks to our 2008 donors for bringing us ever-closer to achieving Drupal-programming perfection.

We are also working on perfecting our Blog!

In the spirit of Kyle Cassidy's Where I Write project, we're asking you to send in photos of yourself in your creative space. Send them in by June 19 with a short description of what makes your space so inspiring, and we'll post the submissions on the NaNoWriMo Blog throughout the summer.

Wondering if 'Drupaly' is an adjective,

Lindsey