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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

Hey there Beautiful Word Warriors!

When you go to the Edit Novel Info page under My NaNoWriMo, you'll notice something new. The Word Count validator is on! We wanted to get the validator up and running a little early to give you time to try it out before we turn on the validator's ability to crown NaNoWriMo winners on November 25th.

Until the 25th, you can just paste your novel into the box, and hit submit, and our robots will count it, and then update your word-count for you. The text is then deleted from our system. The word-count our robots come up with will be slightly different than the count from your word-processor (all word-counters use slightly different methods to determine what counts as a word). So test it out now to see if we're adding to your count, or taking away from it.

Anyhoo, from November 25th through November 30th, everyone who pastes a 50,000-and-over manuscript into the validator will become an official NaNoWriMo 2008 winner, and a shower of certificate-y and web-badge-y goodness will result. I'm looking at the certificate right now, and love it so much that I keep wanting to hug it.

Pasting your 50K+ manuscript into the validator between November 25 and November 30 is the only way to become an official NaNoWriMo winner.

I bolded that so you know we mean business.

And remember: You can scramble that beast before pasting it! Instructions are in the text below the word-count validator.

Shooting for a 4K evening tonight,

Chris

I'm the final set of proofreading eyeballs on the celebrity pep talk emails before they go out, so I get my pep on a little bit early. I read Janet Fitch's pep talk today (due in your inbox tomorrow), and it really changed my story for the better. Try a character shove! You'll be glad you did. This will make sense tomorrow, I promise.

Thinking about celebrity author pep talks made me remember Neil Gaiman's pep talk from last year, which was so good we would send out again this year if we weren't already so blessed with a bounty of new pep talkers. If you're still stuck in the 20,000s and wondering if you should really keep going, please check it out.

Also, I totally agree with WrimoRadio producer Diane: Your answers to the Question of the Week for this Monday's WrimoRadio are absolutely hilarious.

Making my move in the 30K Before Bedtime on Wednesday Rally,

Chris

The Night of Writing Dangerously was a huge success, and more fun than you can shake a tortellini at. Tavia, Lindsey, and I spent this afternoon at the SomArts center stacking up all the rental tables and chairs and getting a little misty eyed thinking about the great people we met. Folks came to write from as far away as Sydney, Edmonton, and North Carolina. Thanks to our attendees and sponsors, the night ended up raising almost $28,000 for our programs! A special thanks goes out to Tupelo Hassman and all her supporters—Tupelo raised $3,100, and went home with the Grand Prize LiveJournal Dell Studio 15 laptop.

Woot. Really. It was one of the happiest nights of my life.

We're still adding up the number of words written, but we'll figure it out this week. And as soon as things calm down, we'll be sending the total in to the Guinness people. Who will likely ignore it. But it's the spirit that counts. If you took photos, please add them to the NaNoWriMo Flickr pool!

Okay! Back to writing, everyone! And thanks to everyone who has sent me smack-talking NaNomails about my word count. This week, I shall rise again! 30K by Wednesday night, baby!

Blaming the fact that I just called you baby (not to mention all of the exclamation points) on the multiple cans of leftover energy drink I consumed during clean-up,

Chris

ps: Write-a-thon photo courtesy of Emily Bristow!

I just wanted to post a quick note to wish you a great halfway day! By the end of the day today, we should be at 25,000 words. Whatever your word count (and I'm a pretty good ways behind par), write as much as you can this weekend. My personal goal: 30K by bedtime on Wednesday. Get there with me!

I'll be heading off to the Night of Writing Dangerously venue in a little bit to help Tavia and the volunteer crew get everything set up, and I couldn't be more excited (or nervous---I'm giving the dinnertime talk and my stomach already feels like a warren of weasels have taken up residence in it). We'll try to get some photos of the night up on the NaNoWriMo blog during the event.

Also, in the midst of fire evacuation orders, Diane managed to complete the Friday episode of WrimoRadio! What a trooper! I'll be posting it in a few. She and her family are okay---thanks to everyone for the well-wishes!

More soon,

Chris
20,025 words

Has anyone else's kitchen become toxic? Last night, I hit the great NaNoWriMo milestone where I ate spaghetti with a spoon because all my forks were buried under ten pounds of unwashed pots, plates, coffee cups, and the remains of thirteen nights of take-out. Yikes. I'm thinking about just throwing my kitchen away and starting over. Who has time to clean? It's almost Week Three!

To everyone who joined me in the 20K Before Thursday Bedtime Challenge: Well done. Ready for our next mission? Let's do 30K by bedtime on Wednesday the 19th. As I'll discuss in this weekend's pep talk, the 20,000s are the last momentum-sucking slog you'll have to endure this month. Getting through them is tough, but once you do, the Road to Awesome will open up before you.

We're looking for interviewees for two WrimoRadio stories! The first is about companies with a lot of employees taking part in NaNoWriMo. The second is about soldiers who are noveling from war zones. If you belong to either group and would be willing to be interviewed, drop wrimoradio@nanowrimo.org a line!

Happy writing weekends, everyone!

Chris
NaNoWriMo

PS: Speaking of companies with a lot of noveling employees, I wanted to give a shout-out to our prolific staff members Lindsey, Tavia, Sam, Cybele, Drew, and Heather. On top of everything else going on right now, they've kept their word counts up and are on track to win. And don't get me started on our amazing interns, who have been kicking all of our word-count butts since Day One. You guys rock!