Breaking News

It's Sunday, November 8---ML Appreciation Day! On this great holiday we celebrate the work our Municipal Liaisons do to help inspire writing around the world. Thank you so much, guys!

When you take a break from noveling today, be sure to send some appreciation to your local chapter-head via email, NaNoMail, or regional lounge post. These tireless volunteers coax and cajole hundreds of millions of words from Wrimos every year, and they make November an incredibly fun place to be. We love you, MLs!

Chris

Before we take the next couple of days to majorly boost our word counts, here are a few updates from the office:

1. Word Count Widgets are working! Just in time to for you not to play with them. Because you’re going to be writing, right? Right. (If you need a break, though, you can find them under the "Fun Stuff" tab.)

2. We got another shipment of shirts and hoodies in this morning! They are flying out of the store, though, so buy now or forever hold your peace.

3. We’re still looking for Daily Q&A guests! If you think you know someone with a great story, tell us all about it! We love stories. Almost as much as we love Tim Tams.

By the end of the weekend, we should be at 13, 336 words.

I'll see you there!

Lindsey

It's so great seeing the word-count numbers rising upwards! If you're among the 70,000 authors who've signed up but not started writing yet, I applaud you. That's the kind of cheeky daredevil-ism that this event is based on. Please do have a word count by the end of this weekend, though, or we'll cry.

If our tears aren't enough to get you noveling and you need another reason to set those sights set on 50K…For the third year running, our fantastic sponsor CreateSpace is offering all NaNoWriMo 2009 winners a free proof copy of your manuscript in paperback book form. They'll even cover basic postage! We've posted a quick overview in the forums, and we'll be putting up more details (along with the actual codes for winners) on the "I Wrote a Novel, Now What?" page on December 2.

Chris
Just south of 6,000 words

Welcome to Back Up Your Novel Day!

To take part in the celebrations, just email your fresh novel to your webmail account, slap it on a flash drive, upload it to your favorite back-up service, or bury your whole computer in an airtight, waterproof capsule at a local park. Anything to make sure those words are safe!

This year, hundreds of NaNoWriMo participants will lose their novels to software crashes, coffeeshop spills, and unexpected hard-drive deaths. It happened to me right before NaNoWriMo began this year, and I've been a wrecked shell of an individual ever since. Learn from my stupidity! Back up that book today!

And there's another, more exciting holiday coming up on the NaNoWriMo calendar as well! Sunday, November 8 is Municipal Liaison Appreciation Day. This is the day we all reach out to our hardworking volunteer MLs with buckets of thanks and stacks of fresh-baked pies to thank them for everything they do to keep us motivated every year. If you've appreciated your ML's efforts, please send them a NaNoMail or email, or post in your Regional Lounge this Sunday and let them know!

Off to preserve my 5,891 mediocre words for posterity,

Chris

1) This is very exciting!

2) Dan has poured on more server juice, and the sites are humming! (I put up a statsy post about yesterday's historic spike on the blog.)

3) We're still sorting out the email queue backlog, and until we do, things coming to you from the site may take a little longer than usual. I just got the October 31 pep talk from myself this afternoon.

4) The "collective word count" on the front page of the site still says zero. Do not be fooled! We've written many more words than that! We'll fix it as soon as we can.

5) Same for widgets!

6) We filled in another book on the fund-o-meter. Thank you so much, donors!

7) And please remember: If you write a paragraph or chapter you don't like, just put it in italics (or change the font color to white). Do not delete! After you write your way across the 50,000-word finish line, you can double back and clip out all the parts of your book that make you cringe (I think you'll surprise yourself with what you decide to keep). For now, just keep moving forward! There's an old folk saying that goes: Whenever you delete a sentence in your NaNoWriMo novel, a NaNoWriMo angel loses its wings and plummets, screaming, to the ground.

Where it will likely require medical attention.

These are words to live by. Resist the tyranny of the delete key! Onward! Upward! To Day Three!

Chris
2018 words

We're off and writing all over the world! Yay!

The first pep talk went out last night, but it landed in a large backlog of forums notifications and emails from Municipal Liaisons to their regions. Our mailroom hamsters have informed us that there is currently a 14-hour (and growing) queue for mail to get out the door.

Hopefully the pep talk will find its way to your inbox today, along with those great ML emails. (All pep talks will go out from nanowrimo_loves_you@nanowrimo.org, so adding that address to your whitelist will help keep these emails out of your Junk folder.)

If you get tired of waiting on the hamsters, you can also read the first pep talk on the site!

Happy start of NaNoWriMo! It's so great to see those word counts blooming!

Chris

Check out the new menu item under Fun Stuff. It’s the Donation Derby! All NaNo regions have been grouped into six teams—the fiercest animals we could conjure—to determine who will reign supreme as the top-donating NaNoWriMo chapter.

For your donation to count toward your region’s final total, you need to be homed to that region. You can find out how to home in the FAQs (or check out NaNoVideo's instructive Episode 8 starring me and Tom Selleck for more on this topic).

Many thanks to lazym, lousywriter13, and Dan Duvall for making this Derby dream a reality.

Nothing like a little healthy competition (and fearsome but cute animals) to liven up an already insane deadline!

Speaking of fearsome but cute, kudos to all Wrimos who are already off-and-writing! Those of us in the US and Canada will be joining you in a few short hours.

Let the races begin!

Lindsey

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