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As the second week of NaNoWriMo dawns, I'd like to take a minute to celebrate our wonderful team of 500+ volunteer chapter heads, called Municipal Liaisons.

If you've been to a kick-off party or write-in this year, it was likely organized by a local ML. Municipal Liaisons send out inspiring regional emails, run the regional lounges, and provide year-round, behind-the-scenes help to us here at headquarters. They're the hardest-working volunteers in the noveling universe, and NaNoWriMo wouldn't be the same without their moxie and can-do spirit.

When you take a break from your noveling this weekend, be sure to send your ML some love via NaNoMail, or post a message in your regional lounge.

Thank you so much, MLs! We couldn't do it without you!

Chris
NaNoWriMo

A lot of you have been wondering, “Hey, where did that Author Search go? How am I supposed to find writing buddies?” This is a great question! No, it wasn’t a trick to get your writing instead of friend-finding (though that would have been a good one!). We want you to have a support system outside of that stuffed rhino that sits on your writing desk.

We really do.

We have disabled the Author Search temporarily while the site has been so heavily trafficked. Believe it or not, that Author Search is a crazy resource-intensive function! Now that the first-week-of-November frenzy has died down a bit, Author Search will return over the weekend. In other exciting news, yet another new server is coming online that will offset the slow-down of thousands of Wrimos using that search function!

I hope you’re all getting on towards 11,666 words! Tonight at midnight marks the end of Week One.

Happy writing to all, and to all a good weekend.

Lindsey

A great email pep talk from Golden Compass author Philip Pullman went out today! If you didn’t get it in your inbox due to overzealous spam blockers, you can read it on our Pep Talks page when we post it there Friday afternoon. And speaking of the Pep Talks page, I’d like to recommend a pre-weekend jaunt through the pep talks that Sue Grafton and Tom Robbins wrote last year.

So. We’re heading into the second weekend of NaNoWriMo. This is a make-or-break period for most Wrimos. If you can set aside a couple hours to write each day this weekend, you’ll get a noveling boost that will lift your spirits and carry you through the rest of the month. Neglect your novel, and you’ll fall behind on your word count, contract scurvy, and lose all your teeth.

I see it happen every year. Please don’t let it happen to you. Make time to write. Try doing 1000-word sessions in the morning, afternoon, and evening on both Saturday and Sunday. Build a word-cushion that you can take naps on in the week ahead.

Eh. The week ahead. Week Two.

More on that wonderful, horrible period soon!

Chris
NaNoWriMo

I spoke with the Great NaNoWriMo Calendar this morning, and she said we should be at about 8333 words by the end of the day today. She also told me that some of you ignored her suggestion to be at 6666 words yesterday, and that she may let you slide on that if you get to 8333 tonight.

Tough lady.

Also, the network of informants we’ve planted amongst your friends, family, and internet service providers have reported that National Backup Your Novel Day on Monday was a dismal failure. Please: For the good of the world. Back that novel up.

We had a major global change this week that will end up impacting the lives of most of our participants. I’m speaking, of course, of Daylight Savings Time. Next time you’re signed into the site, please stroll over to My NaNoWriMo--->Edit User Settings and make sure your time zone is still good to go. If not, you may end up losing an hour to validate your novel on November 30. This would make the Great NaNoWriMo Calendar cry.

As I reported yesterday, we’ve got another server in on the site and Russ and Sam have done some high-end geekery to make it do good things for us. We began feeling the beneficial impact of it yesterday afternoon. We’ll still have congestion for a couple hours around noon, Pacific, each day. But things are much better across the board. Thanks for your patience as we work around the clock to make room on the NaNoWriMo and Young Writers Program sites for a combined turn-out of 140,000 participants!

Wow.

I also want to give a special thanks to tech volunteer Rob Diaz for all his assistance this year, and extend a high-five to everyone who has sent in encouragement and bug reports as we've gotten the NaNoWriMo adventure underway. We couldn't do it without you.

Chris
NaNoWriMo

We interrupt this broadcast to say we got another server up this afternoon and it's done really great things for our load-bearing abilities. In fact, the joy it has brought to our lives makes us want to sing and dance and enjoy an ill-advised plate of nacho-cheese covered jalapeno poppers.

Fiesta!

Anyway, we want to take it a step further tonight (the server, not the cheese), so Russ will briefly take the sites down around 11 pm to implement more goodness. We shouldn’t be gone for more than 20 minutes.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming,

Chris
NaNoWriMo
Still at 7031 words

ps: A great Jonathan Stroud pep talk should be in your inbox right now. Philip Pullman will follow on Thursday.

We like to celebrate NABUYND at least once a week in November. To take part in the festivities, don a crazy hat, then email your novel-in-progress to your favorite webmail account, save it to a flash drive, or make someone with a photographic memory read the whole thing. Then keep them out of direct sunlight until the next back-up.

A new WrimoRadio is live! Thanks so much to everyone who emailed in their contributions. We need your voices again for next Monday’s show. Details are in the podcast.

Last night, Sam and Russ took the site down to bring another server on board. The server isn’t doing much at the moment, but Tuesday morning and afternoon Russ will start moving the database queries that are slowing the site down the most over to this new big guy, which will mean more queries can be handled simultaneously, which will mean greater happiness throughout NaNoLand.

Have a monumental Tuesday everyone! It’s a big day!

Chris
7031 words

To help us flee those frustrating "Connection Timed Out" pages, Russ will be taking the site down briefly tonight around 10 PM Pacific so he can bring another server on board. We shouldn't be away for more than 30 minutes, and then will be back with a little more oomph.

New WrimoRadio going up in a few hours as well!

Loving that new word-count header,

Chris
5031 words and counting (on finishing the whole danged thing tonight)

We've been getting lots of emails from first-time participants asking how you update your word count. Sorry this wasn't more clear!

To update your word count, you can do one of two things:

1) Starting Monday after Russ gets into work and does his magic, you can log into the site, and enter your total word count in that box at the top right of the site. Then hit the yellow "Update" button. Presto! We've been playing with it over the weekend on the test site, and it's pretty great.

2) Until then, you just do it the old-fashioned way. Sign in and go to the My NaNoWriMo page, then click Edit Novel Info. Type in your total word count in the Word Count box, right above the Word Count Validator. Then scroll down to the bottom of the page and click Submit. For now, everything's on the honor system. The Word Count validator will be turned on later in the month, at which point you can just paste in your whole novel and let our scrupulous team of robots do the counting for you.

A new WriMoRadio episode will be going up on Monday. I just heard it, and Diane somehow managed to get about 50 participants on the show. Really great stuff.

We'll also be keeping a close eye on site speed tomorrow. The two 400%-above-normal days of the year are happily behind us, and traffic is already starting its steady drop back to October levels. We'll be bringing Author Search back to the main nav bar as soon as the site is able to handle it.

Thinking I might just go write another chapter now,

Chris
4012 words

Many things!

1) The first pep talk went out. As promised, it contained lots of rock talk. We’ll be sending out emails from Jonathan Stroud and Philip Pullman this week, and then you'll hear from me again on Friday or Saturday. If you get emails from us, but didn't get this one, peep your spam folder.

2) I started my novel! 1700 words and counting. I had absolutely nothing until this morning, when I got an image of a guy downloading this song to have it playing in the background when he proposes to his girlfriend. Which then blossomed into the idea of maybe things not going so well for him in the proposal department, which then grew into several tenable scenes in a (maybe) funny book about what you do when relationships suddenly change. I’m liking it so far, and it seems a little more promising than the orc-filled aquatic-theme-park thriller I was roughing out last week. Congrats to everyone else who got started on their books today!

3) We survived the highest traffic day in the history of NaNoWriMo today. The one-day spike that happens every November 1st is a little terrifying for our servers, but they weathered it, and we’re so proud of them. We’re sorry for the timing out errors you might have experienced. Everything will be less overloaded tomorrow, and then reasonably smooth by Monday evening.

4) Please get at least 3000 words under your belt by the end of this weekend. I don't want to hear any excuses about having to recover from wild Halloween parties. You should have thought about your literary responsibilities to your future adoring reading public before you went out last night.

5) Congratulations to New Zealand, our current regional Word Count leader! Sure, they have a slight advantage due to their time zone placement, but every Kiwi Wrimo also has to wrestle with the fact that it's the middle of a beautiful summer, and they're stuck inside with their laptops. Good show, New Zealand! (Update: Since posting this, Germany and Austria have swiped the crown from New Zealand, and it's looking like Seattle is making a move as well).

Have a great Sunday, everyone!

Chris
NaNoWriMo

Happy official start of NaNoWriMo, everyone! Word-counts are growing, plots are hatching, and 90,000 main characters just appeared on computers around the world, a little bleary-eyed from their travels.

It's so nice to be underway.

The first NaNoWriMo pep talk, in which I talk extensively about slab saws and the similarities between novel-writing and a man handing a child a rock, will be going out around 1 AM, Pacific. We'll post it on the Pep Talk page under Fun Stuff on Monday.

Also, that great new word-count box we added to the top of the site? The one with 000 in it? Russ is still getting it wired up. Sorry for the delay. He says it'll happen Saturday night. In the meantime, please update your word count through your My NaNoWriMo page under Edit Novel Info. Progress bars and graphs are all live, as are novel excerpts. Hooray!

Man. Crazy days. This morning started with not one, but two power outages at our webhost, which took down all our sites. Who needs muffins when you can have adrenaline for breakfast?

But we prevailed. And coffee pretty much fixes everything.

Good luck on those first chapters!

Chris
NaNoWriMo