NaNoWriMo :: NaNoWriMo Blog

Last Thursday the city of Oakland threw a big party to celebrate the "unveiling" of Uptown, the neighborhood where OLL has lived for the last three years. The neighborhood has really come a long way since we moved in, with a ton of great new cafes, bars, and the beautifully restored Fox Theater opening up in the past year. It's an exciting place to be!

Anyway, during the street party, our Development Director Elizabeth and I snuck up into a condo open house and I took this picture down onto the street party below. It showcases the great Fox theater sign, OLL's building, and the enormous black arrow that looms over our office day and night.

Has anyone out there in NaNoLand been to this part of Oakland recently? Does anyone else live with a looming arrow?

Yay, Oakland!

Chris

June 15 marks the midway point for the Southern Cross Novel Challenge, New Zealand's answer to NaNoWriMo. For the Kiwis, June provides the writing-friendly winter weather that we residents of the Northern Hemisphere enjoy during NaNoWriMo.

We're waving from way up here in California and cheering, "Go SoCNoC!"

We're also wondering a few things, like "Do you eat Mint Slices while you're writing?" and "What is the preferred beverage of SoCNoC participants?" and "Where do SoCNoCers fall on the issue of wearing brown with black?"

If there are any Kiwi novelists out there with the answers, please chime in! And keep writing. Only 15 more days to reach 50,000 words!

Wooohoo! I just got back Monday from a three-month sabbatical to Melbourne, Australia. I was there to commune with marsupials, see friends, drink coffees with exceedingly practical names like "flat white" and "long black," spend an embarrassing amount of money on Arnott's cookie products, and hole up with a NaNo-novel I started in 2005.

While I was down under, I read a bunch of great Australian novels, including Steve Toltz's wildly creative A Fraction of the Whole, and Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang. If you've been following the discussions on our Twitter feed, Peter Carey is, ahem, relevant.

(Hint. Hint.)

I also had a chance to meet up for drinks and Mongolian barbecue with the local NaNo groups in Melbourne and Sydney (hello Melbournians! Hello Sydneysiders!). There's nothing better than traveling halfway around the world to eat stir-fry, drink beer, and swap stories with high-velocity novelists.

Below is my favorite photo from the trip, taken by my friend Jane. Has anyone else had the pleasure of hanging out with kangaroos on golf courses? It's the greatest!

So, so glad to be back with Tavia, Lindsey, and Dan here in the office, but so, so missing my underperforming Demons,

Chris

He may have said 'no' to our request for pep, but we believe that Stephen King himself touched this piece of paper. It now hangs directly between the "Things To Think About" and "Things That Rock Our World" sections of our office bulletin board. While it does not rock our world that he declined to contribute his wisdom and encouragement to NaNoWriMo 2009, it distinctly does rock to have something—anything—that has touched the hand of Stephen King.

2008 was an incredible year for pep. We heard from such literary legends as Philip Pullman, Piers Anthony, and Katherine Paterson (to name a few!).

Let's make the 2009 lineup just as amazing and inspiring. We'd love to know who you'd like to hear from that we haven't received pep from before. Discovered a new favorite author? Have an old favorite author?
Let us know!

Edutopia, a project of the George Lucas Educational Foundation, has published an article about NaNoWriMo’s Young Writers Program in the February 2009 issue of their magazine.

In her lengthy and well-researched article, writer Carol Pogash makes the YWP sound as awesome and successful as it is. In truth, it made me wish that I was once again an imaginative third grader that wrote about magical marmots and evil warthog lords. (Although there is nothing to keep me from writing about that in my next NaNo-novel, I suppose.)

I am pretty excited that such a well-regarded and widely distributed publication like Edutopia not only showcased our program, but captured the surprising and effective alchemy of kids and teens challenged to write as much as they can about anything they like. Three cheers for Tavia and all the inspiring educators and young novelists who participated in YWP 2008!

Last week I asked Wrimos to cook up some perspective-bringing comparisons that could help us wrap our heads around this year's record-setting, pants-melting collective word count. I was hoping we'd hit 1.5 billion words, and we ended up clearing that by more than 100,000,000 words.

Here are some of your explanations of how best to understand 1.5 billion's majesty. Got some more calculations to add to this groundbreaking mathematical treatise? Add 'em in the comments! And thanks to Sarah Panian for all her compiling help!

1.5 billion words…

I am now pleased to present the outstanding and esteemed Emily Bristow, our Captain of Capital Ideas and Austin, Texas' Municipal Liaison for six years running. Take it away, Emily!

Last spring, I was startled to learn that NaNoWriMo begins each season in debt. This year, it took $70,000 in loans to launch the event. Wouldn't it be great, I thought, if we could raise enough money to meet expenses AND have something left over? Then, we'd have seed money for next year, and this loan business could be a thing of the past.

Chris created an online Pilot Fundraising Program, and G.L.,Mandrina, SarahJanet, zotz, and I brainstormed like crazy through the spring and summer. I made some proposals to Chris and found myself with a staff position and a title: the ML Captain of Capital Ideas. My mandate was to move things forward and realize some of the team’s fine ideas.

We turned, as we so often do, to our valiant Municipal Liaisons, asking them to add fundraising to their lengthy list of tasks. And they blew us away with their energy and ingenuity. They created forum posts and emails, passed the hat, designed regional t-shirts, set up raffles, hosted brunches, recorded CDs, and even went caroling for NaNoWriMo.

I spent a chunk of the summer planning a fundraising contest to reward everyone's efforts. It turns out there's an intricate relationship between region size, donation history, and a bunch of other variables. But we don't have a lot of data, so we aren't too clear on what that relationship is. Next year, armed with the information we gather from this year, we're planning to have a much larger and louder contest.

What we do have this year is prizes!

• The winning region names prominently displayed on the NaNoWriMo site
• A lovely icon to flaunt across the internet
• A mighty fine trophy
• A congratulatory email from Chris Baty himself

And we're giving them to five fundraising champions*:


#1: Seattle, Washington at $4,395





#2: Los Angeles, California at $3,394.34





#3: Maryland at $2,980





Our top new region: Bloomington-Normal, Illinois at $1,045





Our top region with <100 participants: DeKalb, Illinois, with 34 participants, at $1,175

*Numbers reflect the regional totals as of December 1, 2008.

Winners! We love ya! And we thank everyone who donated or contributed in non-monetary ways. Without you there would be no NaNoWriMo. We are sincerely grateful.

We didn't make our ambitious goal of "ten for ten" - 10% of participants donating in NaNo's 10th year. But we raised our donor rate from 5.42% to 7.19%, and put $387,328 in NaNo’s coffers.

The means we can keep the servers up, lights on, increase server capacity, and hire a tech director. And! Hire a grant writer. Since we didn't hit the target this time, we're going to need some grants (and loans) to launch next year's event. Or, if you're so inclined – you can give us a head start on next year now!

Many thanks to Pamela McRae for her fabulous work on the winners' web badges!

We're still helping a few folks who had internet melt-downs last night get their novels properly validated, but with most of our districts fully reporting, we have some preliminary numbers for 2008. (These numbers don't include the Young Writers Program, which had over 21,000 kid and teen participants doing their own amazing and record-setting things.)

Okay, drum roll, please…

This year, we had 119,301 authors sign up for NaNoWriMo. That's a 17.5% bump in turn-out from 2007, when we had 101,510 writers.

Of everyone registered, 21,683 of us won. That's an 18.2% win rate. If you throw out the first two years of NaNoWriMo win rates as too small to be statistically significant (in 1999 NaNoWriMo had 21 participants, and in 2000 we only had 140), you can see that we just hit an all-time high in percentage of winners. Woot!

NaNoWriMo Win Rates,
A Historic Study
----------------
1999: 28.6%
2000: 20.7%
2001: 14%
2002: 15.6%
2003: 13.7%
2004: 14.3%
2005: 16.6%
2006: 16.2%
2007: 15.1%
2008: 18.2%

Holy cow.

What was behind the increase the percentage of winners so much this year, you ask? I think starting on a weekend was key. It meant people got an encouraging number of words under their belts right out of the gate, and that boost (combined with the fact that we all had four more weekends after the first one) helped keep us going. This was borne out by site traffic as well—we saw much less of a drop-off in returning visitors throughout the month than we typically do.

But I'd love to hear your theories! Post 'em in the comments section.

On the collective word-count front...Together, we wrote 1,519,501,005 1,643,343,993 words. That's a 28% 38% increase over last year, when we reached 1,187,931,929 words.

I'll be posting another blog entry this week to help all of us better grasp what 1,519,501,005 1,643,343,993 words means to humanity, and whether that many words would actually weigh more than a grocery store filled with donkeys (early results point to yes).

The top 10 wordiest regions this year were…
1) Seattle
2) Maryland
3) Germany and Austria
4) Los Angeles
5) Holland and Belgium
6) Chicago
7) Twin Cities (MN)
8) New York City
9) Portland, OR
10) London

I love the geographic spread! And my hat is once again off to Seattle, the city that managed to conquer the entire state of Maryland and the combined might of the multiple European writing powerhouses. Ducks of Seattle, we salute you.

Okay, let's hear it. Why do you think we had so many winners this year? Moon cycles? Global economic crisis? Starbucks dropping the price on drip coffees?

And thanks to NaNoWriMo winner and math scholar Mark Searles for all the numbers help!

Chris