Breaking News

NaNoWriMo kick-off parties are happening all around the world this week! Check your Regional Lounge for details. If you're anywhere near San Francisco this Saturday night, we hope you'll come raise a glass with us at Olive, where we'll be celebrating the imminent arrival of another month of creative mayhem.

The all-ages Pan-Bay NaNoWriMo kick-off party at Olive will run from 7pm to 10pm. And yes, we will make you wear oversized name tags with lots of things to fill out on them.

It's for your own good.

We hope to see you there (or at least see photos of you at a kick-off party in your town on our Flickr pool)!

Chris

So we have this NaNoWriMo blog that gets so sadly ignored in the off-season it's not even funny. And I look at blogs like BoingBoing.net that get updated four times a day and I just shake my head in wonder at their post-itude. But during the on-season, the NaNoWriMo blog actually sees some pretty serious action. Including the latest post about a scam email that's making the rounds from...me!

Happy Tuesday, everyone!

Chris

That reminder email I talked about in the last breaking news went out yesterday to a jaw-dropping 50,000 writers. That's the number of people who had signed up for NaNoWriMo last year, but hadn't logged in yet.

Today, they started logging in. Hooray, and welcome! We've added 6,000 authors to the participant list since Friday evening, and will likely see another 6,000 in the next couple days. Because of the surge from that reminder email, Monday is going to be one of the heaviest traffic days we've ever had on the site.

So the NaNoWriMo.org forecast: Site slowness Monday with scattered bizarre error screens ("low memory" anyone?), clearing late Tuesday as NaNo veterans get bored with filling out their new author profiles and wander back to novel preparations.

Also, I wanted to point out a couple new pages we have this year for those of you just arriving. Several of the companies who have donated to us in a hug-warranting way are making special discount offers to NaNo participants, which live over on the Special Offers page. AlphaSmart, one of the companies on the page, donated 25 more brand-new Neos to our lending library this year. We're loaning all 25 of them to an inner-city classroom in Chicago that wouldn't otherwise have been able to take part in NaNoWriMo. Thanks, AlphaSmart!

We've got featured videos from our Viddler group and our first NaNoWriMo Lifecaster over on the NaNoVideo page. And over on the NaNoWriMo Young Writers Program site, Tavia and her YWP team have cooked up free novel-writing workbooks in PDF form for elementary, middle, and high school YWP participants. They're so much fun that adults have been quietly downloading them as well. Check 'em out!

Having caught a cold, and heading off to acquire the age-old remedy of tea and fried chicken,

Chris

ps: I'm in desperate need of a new novel. I just finished Mark Haddon's A Spot of Bother. Anyone have a recommendation for something in a similar vein I should pick up from the library? Please send me a NaNoMail if so!

Oh man, things are getting exciting. I actually had an inkling of an idea for my novel today on the bike ride to work! I'm going to spend the weekend trying to nudge that inkling into a hazy notion, and then nurture the notion to a full-blown questionable plot by Monday.

It could happen!

I also wanted to warn everyone that the site will likely get slow this weekend. We're sending out a reminder email to all of last year's participants who haven't logged in yet (hi guys!). These emails always cause a spike in site visits, which should settle down again within a couple days.

And speaking of participants! The population of NaNoLand currently stands at 42,000 authors and counting. We had 79,000 last year. Can we beat that total this year?

These next two weeks will tell.

Thanks to everyone who has set their Home Region on the My Regions tab of the My NaNoWriMo page. Keep on Home Regioning, everyone! November is fast approaching.

Off to spend more time with my inkling,

Chris

It's the most feature-filled day of the NaNo calendar so far! Thanks to Russ' work, we now have:

Home Regions! You've hopefully already affiliated with a region (or, in my case fourteen) through the My Regions link on the My NaNoWriMo page. The final step is in visiting the Home Region tab on the same page and choosing one of your regions as your Home Region. Once you've picked a Home Region, you'll have a handy link to your Regional Lounge right on your Author Profile. Also, your word-count in November will count towards your Home Region's overall word-count. Finally, slotting yourself into a home region helps us understand NaNoWriMo demographics better, and lets us know where we need to do more outreach. Be a regional patriot! Pick your Home Region today!

Forum selection! This feature lets you only see the forums you care about on our Forums page. It's on the My NaNoWriMo page under the Forum Selection. Making forums invisible not only helps tame that unruly Forums page, but it saves us database cycles.

Love. Lots of it. Thanks, Russ!

Chris

We just sent out an email to everyone who put their email address in our NaNoRemindMe box on the old site, which means there are going to be a couple thousand folks joining the site these next few days. Welcome to all the new arrivals! The party is just getting started. Grab a drink from the kitchen. There are some chips in the living room. We're all out back in the forums. Come find us!

Also, you'll notice that we finally got donor halos working throughout the site! Thank you, beloved donors! If you want to know who makes NaNoWriMo happen every year, just look for that little angelic glow in the forums and on author profile pages.

Fighting for the last of the bean dip with authors from the Virtual Worlds lounge,

Chris

The good news is that no comments were lost in the writing of this mystery, and they should all be visible now. Even all the ones that say "OMG THERE"S NO COMMENTS!!!1!!" ;)

The bad news is that we've had to disable comment caching since it wasn't working right, and was causing new comments to be hidden from logged in users.

Hopefully this won't cause a major site slow down. Probably it won't cause a major site slow down ;) If it does, we'll work on making the comment caching work the right way. Hopefully we won't have to do that because it's hard and we'd rather work on other, more fun, improvements to the site...

-Russ Firebus

Heads-up to all the Wrimos in the house! We'll be taking the site off-line again at 2pm today to add even more firepower to our database server. The slowness we had in the first week has been solved, but we want to be proactive about getting everything even faster so we can add another 70,000 authors in the next two weeks and still have things be reasonably workable for the site craziness of November 1.

Thanks! Sorry for the hassle! It shouldn't be down long.

Chris

I get a lot of emails from students and professional novelists saying "I don't have a lot of disposable income right now, but I love NaNoWriMo and would love to contribute something."

I typically wave these people away. "Just give us your wholehearted participation, your funny posts in the forums, and your first-born child," I say, "and we'll call it even."

After many disappointing years of participants not following through on their child-rendering obligations, however, we've put together the Donating When You're Broke page with some ideas on contributing to NaNoWriMo when the bank balance is looking a little bleak. Fact: If everyone in NaNoLand Goodsearched on our behalf for one day, we'd have enough to buy that emu ranch we've been fantasizing about for years.

Also, I want to take a minute to raise a mug of coffee to Russ for all the late hours he put into rescuing our site from The Slows this week. He had to rewrite a pretty serious chunk of code to get us where we are now, and the stress of it all would have been enough to send most mortals running for the hills.

Russ' birthday is October 1. Which, for the person in charge of re-launching the NaNo site, is about the worst birthday you can have. Thanks, Russ, for giving up your birthday---and the week thereafter---so the NaNo site could fly.

Still waiting for those first-borns,

Chris

Thanks so much to everyone who came by our office tonight for the first NaNoWriMo packing night of the season. We'll try to post We posted some photos of the action on the blog. We got a bunch of Young Writers Program classroom kits packed up, hundreds of donor goodies envelopes stuffed, three extra-large pizzas eaten, and one Iron and Wine album listened to.

It was a very good evening. But it did take away valuable time away from my current obsession: Reading the forums. My favorite find tonight: You are a NaNoWriMo writer when....

So good.

Chris