Breaking News

We've been getting lots of emails from first-time participants asking how you update your word count. Sorry this wasn't more clear!

To update your word count, you can do one of two things:

1) Starting Monday after Russ gets into work and does his magic, you can log into the site, and enter your total word count in that box at the top right of the site. Then hit the yellow "Update" button. Presto! We've been playing with it over the weekend on the test site, and it's pretty great.

2) Until then, you just do it the old-fashioned way. Sign in and go to the My NaNoWriMo page, then click Edit Novel Info. Type in your total word count in the Word Count box, right above the Word Count Validator. Then scroll down to the bottom of the page and click Submit. For now, everything's on the honor system. The Word Count validator will be turned on later in the month, at which point you can just paste in your whole novel and let our scrupulous team of robots do the counting for you.

A new WriMoRadio episode will be going up on Monday. I just heard it, and Diane somehow managed to get about 50 participants on the show. Really great stuff.

We'll also be keeping a close eye on site speed tomorrow. The two 400%-above-normal days of the year are happily behind us, and traffic is already starting its steady drop back to October levels. We'll be bringing Author Search back to the main nav bar as soon as the site is able to handle it.

Thinking I might just go write another chapter now,

Chris
4012 words

Many things!

1) The first pep talk went out. As promised, it contained lots of rock talk. We’ll be sending out emails from Jonathan Stroud and Philip Pullman this week, and then you'll hear from me again on Friday or Saturday. If you get emails from us, but didn't get this one, peep your spam folder.

2) I started my novel! 1700 words and counting. I had absolutely nothing until this morning, when I got an image of a guy downloading this song to have it playing in the background when he proposes to his girlfriend. Which then blossomed into the idea of maybe things not going so well for him in the proposal department, which then grew into several tenable scenes in a (maybe) funny book about what you do when relationships suddenly change. I’m liking it so far, and it seems a little more promising than the orc-filled aquatic-theme-park thriller I was roughing out last week. Congrats to everyone else who got started on their books today!

3) We survived the highest traffic day in the history of NaNoWriMo today. The one-day spike that happens every November 1st is a little terrifying for our servers, but they weathered it, and we’re so proud of them. We’re sorry for the timing out errors you might have experienced. Everything will be less overloaded tomorrow, and then reasonably smooth by Monday evening.

4) Please get at least 3000 words under your belt by the end of this weekend. I don't want to hear any excuses about having to recover from wild Halloween parties. You should have thought about your literary responsibilities to your future adoring reading public before you went out last night.

5) Congratulations to New Zealand, our current regional Word Count leader! Sure, they have a slight advantage due to their time zone placement, but every Kiwi Wrimo also has to wrestle with the fact that it's the middle of a beautiful summer, and they're stuck inside with their laptops. Good show, New Zealand! (Update: Since posting this, Germany and Austria have swiped the crown from New Zealand, and it's looking like Seattle is making a move as well).

Have a great Sunday, everyone!

Chris
NaNoWriMo

Happy official start of NaNoWriMo, everyone! Word-counts are growing, plots are hatching, and 90,000 main characters just appeared on computers around the world, a little bleary-eyed from their travels.

It's so nice to be underway.

The first NaNoWriMo pep talk, in which I talk extensively about slab saws and the similarities between novel-writing and a man handing a child a rock, will be going out around 1 AM, Pacific. We'll post it on the Pep Talk page under Fun Stuff on Monday.

Also, that great new word-count box we added to the top of the site? The one with 000 in it? Russ is still getting it wired up. Sorry for the delay. He says it'll happen Saturday night. In the meantime, please update your word count through your My NaNoWriMo page under Edit Novel Info. Progress bars and graphs are all live, as are novel excerpts. Hooray!

Man. Crazy days. This morning started with not one, but two power outages at our webhost, which took down all our sites. Who needs muffins when you can have adrenaline for breakfast?

But we prevailed. And coffee pretty much fixes everything.

Good luck on those first chapters!

Chris
NaNoWriMo

What a crazy night! We ended up spending a few hours dark last night while Russ tended to our biggest, baddest database server who suddenly developed a serious problem at 6:15 pm.

Russ (a robot whisperer) got things back up and running again, and we're keeping an eye on everything as we head into the hurricane of October 31 and November 1. Turning off the Author Search today helped a lot with site speed, and we may need to take some other steps if things get unstable under the delightfully insane load of the next two days.

And did I mention it's ONE DAY 'TIL NOVEL?

And that they are (almost) already noveling in Australia and New Zealand??

Oh, this is so cool.

One of the things that Russ was supposed to do tonight instead of fix a major technological break-down was finalize the wiring of the word-count box on the top of the site. He'll finish it tomorrow, but if you are in Australia or New Zealand (or, later, Europe), the top of the site will display 000 for the first part of your writing day.

Ignore it, and update your word count through the Edit Novel Info link in your profile. Your progress bar on your My NaNoWriMo should work fine, and the word-count graph in your profile will update itself every 24 hours.

Good luck, everyone!

More soon,

Chris
NaNoWriMo

**Update: Whoomp! That speed increase you just felt was us turning off the Author Search for a little while. We know it's a pain to try and find writing buddies without it, so we'll bring it back as soon as the maelstrom of November 1 has passed.**

Hola, authors! The noveling train will be pulling out of the station in less than two days now (much less if you live in Australia or New Zealand). We've all been working on NaNoWriMo since May, so it's really hard to believe the time to write is actually almost here. As part of our last-minute chores, we've been scurrying around loading the pep talks into the chute, answering the escalating numbers of emails from eager writers, and testing word-count features around the site.

With so many Wrimos, cheerleaders, and passers-by accessing the main and Young Writers Program sites these next few days, things will be very slow from about 9 AM Pacific to 8 PM Pacific through November 3 or so.

In the meantime, browsing without logging in makes the pages load faster. Russ and Sam will also be doing everything they can to make things quicker through the dark arts of "query optimization" and "database tuning." We've doubled our sever capacity from 2007, and every year we're able to put aside a bigger chunk of cash for more server enhancements. We'll be doing it this year too.

Finally, does anyone have an extra plot they could loan me for November? Mine seems to have gone missing. I'd be very grateful.

Feeling tired and happy,

Chris
NaNoWriMo

In the wee hours of the morning, we emailed out an overview of November containing all the key milestones in your upcoming month of prose triumph. For those of you whose spam filters grabbed it, I'll try to post it on the site today. I also wanted to extend a heartfelt thanks to everyone who answered our call to donate. We hug you twice.

Russ got a new webserver up late last night as well. Yay Russ! Continued hot tip for these heavy traffic days: Pages load much faster if you're not signed in.

More soon,

Chris
NaNoWriMo

Great news! We've put up a brand-new episode of WrimoRadio radio over there in the block to the right. Tune in and meet Diane Bock, our new podcast producer and host. She's fantastic, and is exceptionally good at making me chuckle like the guys from Car Talk. Welcome on board, Diane!

We'll be sending out an all-participant email in the next 24 hours that lays out our shared Path to Victory for the next five weeks. Russ is currently working on some server optimizations to make the site run as speedily as possible as we climb into the biggest traffic week in NaNoWriMo history.

Looking at our Google Analytics for yesterday, it looks like our usual October 30 traffic spike began three days early this year (welcome, everyone!), so things will be slow-loading for the next week or so. Even with our great new servers, we'll have time-out errors and other website misbehavior from October 30th through November 2nd as the number of visitors quadruples. Hint: You can browse all pages of the site much faster if you're not signed in.

Finally, please donate something today to help cover NaNoWriMo's costs. We're a grassroots, participant-supported event with big dreams and limited resources. We need your support to make NaNo happen.

Thanks, everyone!

More soon,

Chris

NaNoWriMo starts in FIVE DAYS!!!!

Doing the math correctly,

Chris

One week remaining until writing commences! It's been inspiring to see so many folks roughing out ideas and characters with each other in the forums.

For me, one-week-out tends to be the magical window when I begin receiving a wealth of half-baked ideas from my imagination, all of which it fervently pitches as the centerpiece for that year's novel. Most of these tend to be barely altered versions of real-life stories that people tell me that week, or news headlines or advertisements I misread.

This morning, I saw the following headline on Yahoo news: "Seven orcas missing from Puget Sound, researchers say"

Being half-awake, I misread it as: "Seven orcs missing from Puget Sound, researchers say"

At which point my imagination galloped over. "Hey!" it said, excitedly rubbing its little hands together. "Check this plot out! What if there were some sort of floating orc pen off the coast of Washington State? And over years of seaborn captivity, these grumpy orcs had become passably good swimmers, had developed a taste for kelp, and had renounced their slaughtering, pillaging ways to become friendly tourist attractions, complete with hoop-jumps and show-stopping finales where they leapt out of the water to nimbly pluck a mackerel from the mouth of their trainers? All is going well, until one day seven of them simply disappear? Yeah? And, over on the mainland, some very strange things start happening. Boom! What do you think? Pure gold, right?"

Trying not to offend, I'll grab the little notebook that I keep close at hand in October and November, and jot down something like "orcs escape mackerel sound," a note so cryptic that I'm guaranteed to read it a few days later and have absolutely no idea what I was talking about.

Still, when you amass enough of those, eventually something sticks. My tip: Get your own wee notebook if you don't already have one, and keep it and a pen handy these next couple days. Go on walks. Take long showers. Good ideas come at the strangest times, and I have a feeling some humdingers will be coming your way soon.

Enjoy the weekend, everyone. We'll be posting a new WrimoRadio on Monday.

Chris
NaNoWriMo

There's always been a special connection between LiveJournal and NaNoWriMo. In our early years, it sometimes felt like half the population of NaNoLand was either an LJer or someone who found out about us through an LJer's blog. So it made me all warm and fuzzy when LiveJournal brought us a wonderful birthday present for our 10th year. Not only are they contributing a tricked-out Dell Studio 15 as a grand prize at our November 15th Write-a-thon, but they are also donating $1 to our Young Writers Program for every LiveJournal member who wins NaNoWriMo this year.

How cool is that?

So here's a shout-out to all the LJers in the house: You are brave. You are capable. And this year, trying is not an option. Forget that stuff about having a low-pressure month exploring your imagination. This year, it's all about winning. Log your noveling intent on the LiveJournal NaNoWriMo community page, and then write those pants off in November.

To everyone else: With just one week left to go, we're almost at 60,000 authors. We've never seen this many folks signed up so early! It's going to be a great, record-setting November.

Still without a plot or characters and feeling pretty good about it,

Chris
NaNoWriMo