Breaking News

We've almost run out of November in Australia and New Zealand! To our friends down under: Write your pants off! We're rooting for you!

We sent out an email yesterday asking for folks who had gotten something out of NaNoWriMo to make a donation and give something back. So many generous folks responded to the call that it was hard to get through to the Donation Station this morning. Things are speedy in the Donation Station again now, and we've raised $18,000 since yesterday, pushing us up to a 6% donation rate, and getting us so, so close to paying all our 2008 bills for NaNo and the YWP.

Thanks to all the SuperWrimos who donated! If you tried to donate and found the check-out line too long, come on back! We need you. We hug you.

Finally, I got over 100 responses to my request to help me put 1.5 billion words—the amount I'm hoping we'll collectively write this November—into perspective. They were so brilliant, that I'm going to collect them for a blog post in the first week of December.

To give you a taste of their genius, here are the first three I received.

1.5 billion words would…

--Fill 2,678 copies of War and Peace. Since Amazon lists the tome as weighing 1.6 lbs, so that's roughly 4.3 tons of words. (wolfcaroling)

--Weigh as much as 38 baby elephants (4500 kg). Assuming they're as ferocious as baby elephants, they would surely beat that ninja army. Anyway, if they were put in a massive stack, they would be as tall as the Empire State Building (not including the spire) and taller than the Eiffel Tower, at 390m of pure books. (mangocheesecake)

--Go approximately the distance from Chicago to Los Angeles (if every word was as short as the letter "a") and go around the entire circumference of the earth twice (if every word were as long as "antidisestablishmentarianism") (Thatssorich66)

Still hugging you,

Chris
NaNoWriMo Winner 2008

We're headed into the final weekend of NaNo 2008! If you signed up for the Friday Before Bedtime Mini-Challenge and made your 45K or 50K, congratulations! I spent this week watching word counts shoot up across the site, and was floored by all the progress people made in such a short amount of time.

The Thanksgiving burden of consuming many kinds of delicious pies distracted me from my challenge goal of hitting 50K by bedtime tonight. But I'm at 46,500, and will win tomorrow. Barring a second onset of Thanksgiving, which seems unlikely.

Sigh.

A few important items:

1) The Friday episode of WrimoRadio got bumped back a day so Diane and I could have Thanksgiving off. It'll go up tomorrow and feature an interview I did with NaNoWriMo winner Sara Gruen, who I cajoled into promising us all roles in the Hollywood adaptation of her NaNoWriMo novel, Water for Elephants.

2) Please make sure your time zone is set correctly under My NaNoWriMo-->User Settings. Yeah, I'm a broken record about this. But the time-zone setting tells the word count validator when to go away, and we don't want to rob you of a single second of validation time.

3) If you win early, please validate early! Every year, thousands of people cross to 50K on Saturday or early Sunday morning, and decide to wait until Sunday night to validate. Then they lose track of time and sprint off to validate at 11:59 PM and find their cat is on the computer and in the middle of some gnarly World of Warcraft guild raid and is way-grumpy and ridiculously slow about closing out of the game. By the time they load the NaNoWriMo site, the validator is shut and sadness ensues. If you have 50K, you can validate now and continue to update your word count until 11:59:59 PM local time on November 30th. Do it! It's nice being purple.

4) As of right now, we've collectively written 1,322,650,718 words. This beats last year's total collective word count of 1,187,931,929 and we still have two days of writing left! Take that, 2007! Is it possible we might see 1.5 billion words written this month?

5) Seriously. 1.5 billion words? Amazing! Please: Someone do a mind-blowing, perspective-bringing calculation of what 1.5 billion words would mean, and NaNoMail it to me and I'll post it on the Breaking News tomorrow. Would 1.5 billion words stretch to Jupiter and back? Weigh more than France? Out-grapple a ninja? We want to know!

Have a great last weekend everyone! Let's get to 1.5 billion!

Chris

I am envisioning a beautiful, word-filled taco sitting on your writing plate today.

Eat the taco, my friend. Eat the taco.

Chris

So it's Thanksgiving in the US, and we wish everyone celebrating the holiday a great afternoon of family, food, and hiding from family and food so you can get some writing done.

In my family, we had a Thanksgiving tradition of offering up gratitude for things you were thankful for. As a teenager, this was an excellent opportunity for me to roll my eyes and make smart-ass comments about a number of issues, including chores, my repressive curfew, and the fascist limits placed on my ability to tie up the family phone line day and night.

Take that, beleaguered and well-meaning parents.

Anyway, now that I'm older and somewhat less of a petulant jerkface, I've come to really appreciate the idea of sending out love letters to the world at least once a year in November. With that in mind, I want to offer thanks today to everyone who has supported NaNoWriMo and the Young Writers Program by making a tax-deductible donation this year. So far, nearly 5% of our fantastic participants have chipped in to help pay for the 2008 event. You can recognize these heroes by their striking good looks, above-average posture, and glowing halos on their author profiles.

Our Thanksgiving dream is to see more Wrimos join these superstars in contributing something towards our many expenses. If 10% of our participants donate this year, we'll be able to pay off all our 2008 bills, keep the sites up in the off-season, and bring back an awesomely improved NaNoWriMo and YWP in 2009. If you've gotten something out of NaNoWriMo, we'd love it if you could please take a minute today to give something back. The staff and I thank you mightily!

Setting aside a Tupperware container of leftover mashed potatoes for you,

Chris
NaNoWriMo

Howdy peoples! Lindsey has been getting a lot of emails from premature winners—Wrimos who accidentally double-pasted their novel into the validation box, and ended up winning (with a huge word count) before they actually hit 50K. Unwinning yourself is easy! Just follow the bolded instructions below the word-count validator.

In an email I sent out in late October (man, that feels like six years ago now), I mentioned the November 25th appearance in the NaNoWriMo store of a mythic, never-before-seen beast: A limited-edition NaNoWriMo winner's t-shirt. We've pushed the arrival of this shirt back to Friday, December 12 to give us time to compose a Titanic-style theme song suitable to its majesty. I'll post a Breaking News when the shirt is available on the 12th!

We're up to 4,343 winners!

Happy Wednesday writing, everyone! I'm shooting for a 4,000-word-or-bust evening!

Chris

To all the 40K-By-Monday mini-challenge winners out there: You are the wind beneath my wings. Doesn't it feel good to be on top of this wordy mountain, peering down into Victoryland and The Great Nap beyond?

Yes. Yes it does.

So. There are two final mini-challenges of the year. Both of them end on Friday.

Mini-Challenge A: If you live in a part of the world where relatives do not come to your home and eat your food on Thursday (AKA Thanksgiving), the mini-challenge is to get to 50K ahead of schedule. Yep. Mini-Challenge A is to be at 50K by bedtime on Friday. It's crazy. But doable. (If you live in the US, but aren't hosting a meal or traveling out of town, this is your challenge.)

Mini-Challenge B: If you are hosting guests or traveling out of town for Thanksgiving—or if your word count is currently under 30K—you need a greater sanity buffer built into your challenge. But you're not off the hook! Mini-Challenge B is to be at 45K by bedtime on Friday. That means you'll have the whole weekend to wrap up the 5000 words you need to win.

I'll be undertaking Mini-Challenge A. To all the challengers out there, I salute your moxie and noveling panache. You've come so far. NaNoWriMo is almost over. Let the final challenge begin!

Thinking that "challenge" looks like a made-up word now,

Chris

**UPDATE: Sorry everyone, I just realized this BN post was severely lacking in taskmastering, threats, and exclamation points. At this late stage in the mini-challenge, we need all three. So! Remember! We're going to hit 40K before bedtime tonight! All of us. Even if it hurts a little. Tonight, we tackle the hill! We can do it!**

We have winners! We have winners! As of right now, 58 folks have validated their novels and skipped off to the nearest write-in or dance club to celebrate. Given previous years' win rates, we'll likely add about 17,000 more folks to that list in the next six days.

How cool is that?

We also have a sheepish apology to those of you who have received the great pep talk email from Nancy Etchemendy on the Young Writers Program digital letterhead, with the Young Writers Program unsubscribe footer. Russ sent it out on the wrong template. He'll be sending it out again on the right letterhead tonight.

Scurrying off to find 4,000 words buried somewhere on my laptop,

Chris

Or at least it will in a few hours! It's after midnight on Sunday night/Monday morning here in California, which means the 25th is just a few hours away for the time zone-y overachievers in Australia and New Zealand.

If everything goes according to plan, we'll be seeing our first purple winner bars on the site by the time we wake up Monday morning. Congrats, victors! You are amazing. Please report any winner-related bugs in the Tech Help forum so we can get right on them.

For those of us still far way from 50K: We have almost an entire week left to get our novels validated. Plenty of time! Plenty of time!

I'm sending out good homestretch writing vibes to everyone shooting to get to 40K before bedtime tonight. I just tipped over the 35K point, and I'm feeling that last-week momentum starting to build.

Also, I want to extend a personal thank-you to the band the Wombats, whose "Party in a Forest" has now powered about half of my novel. Ditto the Eels song "Fresh Feeling," the Hold Steady's "Sequestered in Memphis," and Sigur Ros' "[crazy-long Icelandic song title with accents I sadly don't know how to make in HTML]."

I forget every year how I pretty much spend my entire November listening to a short playlist over and over and over, and how intensely those five or six songs become part of the writing process. Thank you, musicians of the world, for making such beautiful soundtracks for us all to novel by.

See you in the (purple) morning,

Chris

We're spending the weekend here at NaNo HQ testing the site's "win" features and making sure everything works smoothly for the 25th, when official winning begins. Today, we locked in the new winner's certificate and web badges. So nice!

Winning starts on the 25th, which, for you Australians and Kiwis, is practically yesterday. A high-five to everyone making that long drive towards the finish line! We're closing in on victory! I'm hoping to get to 33K tomorrow. Then on to 38K by Sunday night, so I'll be within our 40K goal for Monday BBT (before bedtime).

My Week Four pep talk should be going out late this weekend.

In case you need another reason to enjoy a caffeinated beverage, NaNoWriMo travel mugs are back in stock.

Blinking wildly,

Chris

I felt the ground move last night here in California. It was not an earthquake. It was the sheer game-changing momentum of thousands of NaNoWriMo participants digging deep within themselves and hitting 30K by bedtime.

Or maybe it actually was an earthquake. I haven't read the news yet.

Regardless, congratulations to those of you who took up the 30K By Bedtime on Wednesday challenge and nailed it. The thought of embarrassing myself in front of you pushed me to spend most of last night at a write-in in Berkeley, where one of our great local MLs, Candace, browbeat me across the 30K goal line.

It wasn't pretty, and I think I permanently husked my eyeballs. But I'm so, so glad to be at 30K. If you're not there yet, please come! You'll love it. But please be sure to blink occasionally while typing.

Our next mission: Let's push on to 40K by bedtime on Monday. I'll be there. You'll be there. We'll be totally caught up. And when we're through doing our 40K happy dance, we can begin icing the champagne together.

Mmm…champagne,

Chris