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How about that Week Two, eh?

A pep talk from Lynda Barry has just gone out to help you through the wilds of this week. If you're not getting the pep talks in your inbox, you can always find them on the 2009 Pep Talks page on the site. We'll post the pep talks within 24 hours of sending them out to participants. We hope they help you corral those plot bunnies!

And now for something completely different.

We're holding a Surge Protector Drive from now until November 16. Instead of donating, buy us a surge protector for the Night of Writing Dangerously Write-a-thon and you'll receive the $25 donation package and a halo! All you need to do is buy the cord, and forward the receipt along with your username and address! (We like to write dangerously, but not an electrical-fire kind of danger.)

Off to write at an indie bookstore,

Lindsey

Week Two of NaNoWriMo often gets a bad rap.

In previous years, Week Two has been blamed for everything from incidents of spontaneous limb-sloughing to global potato famines. We're afraid we've contributed to Week Two's poor brand image by yammering on and on about the challenges of this phase of the noveling adventure. We've said that getting over the Week Two Hump is the hardest and most important thing you'll do in November, and that if you can power out of Week Two's orbit with your word count intact then you're practically guaranteed a victory. Because Week Two can be so spirit-testing.

We were wrong. So, so wrong.

Thanks to a sizable grant we received this morning from the Week Two Tourism Bureau and Chamber of Commerce, we've come to understand that Week Two is actually the best week of NaNoWriMo. From here on out, we would like to echo the Week Two Tourism Bureau's sentiments that Week Six is actually the hardest week of the event. For reasons that we will articulate as soon as we understand them.

In the meantime, keep up those great word counts! Congrats to everyone who dug deep and rose to the challenge to be at 15,000 by bedtime last night. We rocked it!

Loving Week Two!

Chris

Hey there!

Dan is going to be taking the sites down for maintenance today around 2 pm Pacific. Which will give us the 20 minutes we need to write thousands of words and reach our sworn goal of 15,000 words for the day. Right? Right!

Practicing my high-speed typing maneuvers in anticipation,

Chris

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