First off—to everyone who ramped their word counts north of 30,000 this weekend, I congratulate you. Our word count bumps were instrumental in pushing us past last year's record-setting collective word count by a huge margin. Two billion words this year? Yes, please.

We're in the home stretch now. The 30,000s are so much better than the 20,000s its not even funny.

We held the third-annual Night of Writing Dangerously last night, and it almost made me cry it was so great. Two hundred folks from Australia, Canada, and throughout the US gathered together in San Francisco's most beautiful ballroom, united in the common cause of stuffing ourselves silly, winning prizes, and writing our pants off.

In addition to all that pantsless noveling, we raised over $30,000 for NaNoWriMo and the Young Writers Program. Final word-count totals for the group for the night are still to come, but Sarah's early tabulations has us over 500,000 words for the evening. Which is eerie, as that's the number of donuts we consumed as well. We'll be putting up a blog post today with a photo round-up. (If you were there and took photos, please add them to the NaNoWriMo Flickr pool!)

The Week Four pep talk email will be going out late tomorrow, which is also the day of our incredible, life-changing, history-making attempt at raising $100,000 in donations in a single day. If we do it, we've promised to embarrass ourselves publicly on an epic scale. (Lindsey is already practicing her interpretive dance moves here in the office.)

The drive starts at midnight, Pacific tonight!

Happy Week Four, everyone!

Chris