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Congrats to everyone who has started writing! NaNoWriMo XI has begun!

The sites are working great, but author sign ups are continuing to surge and we want to bump up to a larger database to make sure we have plenty of room for everybody. To do this, we'll need to take the sites down for about an hour today around 4:45 PM Pacific.

Back in a jiffy!

Chris

This spring I spent three incredible months on sabbatical in Melbourne, Australia. I puttered around in the State Library of Victoria, met the nicest people ever, and went golfing with a kangaroo.

I am jealous of the Aussies and Kiwis for so many reasons. But tonight I am jealous of them because they are going to start writing in a few hours. Thanks to their forward-thinking choice in continental placement, Australia, New Zealand, and their neighbors will be leading the charge into NaNoWriMo.

I take my hat off to you, my Southern Hemispherical brethren. Write well! We'll follow soon!

Chris

ps: We broke 100,00 sign ups today! Woot!

As promised yesterday, here are the Top 50 NaNoWriMo cities, measured by traffic to our site over the last month. In total, we had 12,983 cities and towns send their inhabitants to NaNoland in October!

In 12,983rd place was a town called Dinosaur, where a single citizen stumbled onto the site on October 20th, spent 20 minutes browsing five pages, then wandered back out into the night, never to be seen again.

We miss you, Dinosaur citizen.

Anyway, here they are! Thank you, Google Analytics for allowing us this moment of nerddom!

City/Visits

London 31,407
New York 18,168
Sydney 12,373
Los Angeles 10,466
Seattle 10,054
Melbourne 10,032
Portland 9431
(not set) 9171
San Francisco 8378
Chicago 8213
Denver 7358
Minneapolis 7043
Houston 5150
St Louis 5136
Atlanta 5131
Brisbane 5107
Austin 5086
Eugene 5035
Don Mills 4993
Edmonton 4808
Washington 4630
Calgary 4469
Dallas 4047
Manchester 3816
Birmingham 3753
Ottawa 3694
Perth 3670
Philadelphia 3595
Sacramento 3528
Phoenix 3521
Columbus 3476
San Antonio 3435
Albuquerque 3402
Dublin 3313
Indianapolis 3295
Helsinki 3170
Tucson 3123
Vancouver 3103
Pittsburgh 3095
Nashville 3087
San Jose 3056
Adelaide 3053
Honolulu 3003
Winnipeg 2981
Singapore 2969
Auckland 2946
Kansas City 2926
Glasgow 2868
San Diego 2833
Colorado Springs 2822

Two days until noveling commences!

Chris

That's t-minus two days 'till noveling!

We've been getting a lot of emails from 2008 participants asking how to update the 2008 participant/win status on their Author Profile. It's easy! Just log into the site and go to Author Info (under My NaNoWriMo). Scroll down until you see the boxes where you can set Years Done/Years Won, and click on 2008 in the "done" area. If you won in 2008, click on 2008 in the "won" area as well.

If you'd like to select multiple Years Done or Years Won on a PC, hold down the "Ctrl" button while clicking. On a Mac, you hold down the "Command" button while clicking.

Presto! NaNoWriMo participation record complete! Next year, we may see if we can automate this, but for now it's on the honor system.

Chris

Four days? Four days!

We just added author number 86,724 to the Roster of Champions, and signed up our 1,100th Young Writers Program classroom!

And speaking of geeky numbers...Today I was looking at our Google Analytics page, and grabbed some stats for NaNoWriMo visits over the past month, broken down by country. There were some real surprises on the list, but nothing quite as surprising as what I saw when I ran the breakdown of visitors by city. (London, you have been spending a lot of time in our forums.) I'll try to post the city list tomorrow!

Sorry for the lack of formatting---I just grabbed it from the spreadsheet.

Top 50 Countries/Territories, Ranked by Visits

United States 673,795
UK 83,107
Canada 71,940
Australia 35,175
Germany 16,267
Netherlands 13,746
Finland 7679
Sweden 7192
France 5910
New Zealand 5792
(not set) 5047
Ireland 4556
Philippines 3768
India 3115
Japan 2932
South Africa 2746
Singapore 2730
Norway 2519
Spain 2325
Denmark 2129
Belgium 2120
South Korea 1812
Austria 1810
Malaysia 1758
Switzerland 1667
Mexico 1651
Italy 1633
Israel 1396
Portugal 1245
Brazil 1125
Indonesia 1100
Hungary 1055
China 1049
Romania 1010
Poland 772
Turkey 754
Russia 712
Latvia 671
Hong Kong 663
Argentina 612
Puerto Rico 538
United Arab Emirates 507
Greece 449
Estonia 438
Chile 401
Czech Republic 370
Thailand 289
Malta 284
Saudi Arabia 275
Croatia 256

And that concludes this geographic nerd-out! Happy Wednesday, everyone!

Chris

A couple things!

1) This time next week, we will all be noveling. It boggles the mind.

2) If you are teaching a NaNoWriMo-related class to adults (at a university, adult school, community center, etc.) would you mind dropping us a line? We've put together some free resources for you, and would love to get them to you and hear more about your class!

3) We're over 10% of the way to our fundraising goal for the year! Thank you donors! As detailed on the Donating When Broke page, one of the easy ways you can help NaNoWriMo and the Young Writers Program is to use the Yahoo-powered GoodSearch. Last year, we raised over $2,000 just from GoodSearchers! Help your online novel research pay off for both you and NaNoWriMo! We're setting an ambitious goal of raising $1000 in November from GoodSearch. We're all GoodSearching here in the office! Please join us!

78,000 authors and counting!

Chris

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