Chris Baty's blog

The November 1 spike!

Chris Baty — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:35:32 +0000

This is the kind of thing that only me and about four other people (hi, mom!) are interested in, but for those four people, I wanted to post a screenshot from Google Analytics showing yesterday's traffic to NaNoLand.

November 1 has always brought our servers to their knees. This year, Dan moved us to Amazon's EC2 cloud computing platform so we could try to better handle everyone who comes to the site in the Cyclone Window of October 30-November 4.

It's working. We saw "page timed out" screens during peak hours yesterday, and there are a couple other things we want to improve today and tomorrow. But so far this year's Cyclone Window has felt more like a Gentle Shower Window, despite the fact that we have 40,000 more people on the site this year than last. Then I got up this morning and saw exactly how much traffic the site had been handling yesterday and still chugging along. (For comparison, the 2008 traffic is in green.)

For the record, we had 271,320 visits in that 24-hour period, with our servers offering up 2,079,398 pages to visitors. Busiest day in NaNo history by an extraordinary margin.

Thanks so much to Dan for all his hard work (and lost weekends!). Thanks so much to all our halo'd donors for allowing us to improve our systems!

Back to my novel!

Chris

November gadget meltdown starting early this year?

Chris Baty — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 01:34:39 +0000

I've always found it uncanny the way perfectly healthy gadgets seem to implode during NaNoWriMo. Ipods that we're depending on for noveling soundtracks decide to spontaneously reformat themselves. Participants' laptops crash and burn with alarming frequency (usually taking everything from a few chapters to entire books with them when they go).

This is why it's such a great idea to email your novel to yourself via webmail every few days in November. It's also why I wasn't completely surprised today when the hard drive in my new Dell laptop got corrupted and died. Eeep! I've never had a computer just die before (see the sad photographic evidence, above). Anyone else getting the gadget meltdowns a little early this year?

Chris

Predictions for NaNoWriMo 2009?

Chris Baty — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:29:26 +0000

So 2008 was a really great year for NaNoWriMo. We had an all-time-high win rate (18.2%), a record-smashing number of words written (1.6 billion), and a huge number of participants (119,301). After the event ended, we all spent a fair amount of time here on the blog scratching our heads over what made 2008 such a bountiful year for month-long noveling. Was it the recession? The historic nature of it being the 10th NaNoWriMo? The fact that November magically harbored five weekends that year?

Whatever it was, the numbers were very, very big.

This year is looking like NaNoWriMo will grow again. Site traffic is up 20%. Sign-ups are up 10% from this time last year, and we just sent out our annual "come back and write with us!" email to last year's participants (four days later than we did last year).

So here's the question: Why might more people be signing up to write novels this year than last? Is it still the recession giving people more free time for book-writing? Is it just more people hearing about the challenge through things like Twitter and Facebook? If this is your first year, what inspired you to take part now?

And does anyone care to take a guess on what this year's sign-up numbers for NaNoWriMo will be?

Excited and nervous,

Chris

Field trip to Babylon!

Chris Baty — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 00:46:30 +0000

On Friday, Lindsey and I spent the morning at Babylon Burning, the San Francisco screenprinter who is handling all the NaNoWriMo shirts (and new sweatshirt!) this year. We listened to the Strokes and the Shangri-Las, debated various Pantone colors and design dimensions, and watched as the team there began pulling the first of the new shirts off the line. Thanks so much to Babylon for hosting us! Here are some photos from the big day…

Arriving at Babylon

The line-up ahead of us

Boxes of blank shirts waiting to be transformed into NaNogoods

The films that get turned into screens

Mike, screening up a storm

Figuring out the right green color for the black NaNo '09 shirt took us almost an hour

The green picked, the shirts start rolling (and Clam starts stacking)

We wanted to make a fun, new NaNoWriMo shirt. Since NaNo feels a lot like camp to us, we asked our graphic design whiz Graham to make a design for "Camp NaNoWriMo." The slogan on the sign (hard to make out here) reads: "An idyllic writers retreat, smack-dab in the middle of your crazy life." We love Graham.

Close up of Camp NaNoWriMo shirts

One of the comments we get every year is that we need to offer more shirts for people who aren't participating that year, but who still want to show their support of NaNoWriMo. Designer Graham came up with a simple, all-purpose tee that we're totally in love with. It's the first white tee we've made since 2002!

We're doing the 2009 shirt on both black and cranberry. This is me proudly waving the first cranberry to come off the line.

And, for the first time ever: NaNoWriMo sweatshirts! We went with these incredibly thick, soft sweats that cost a little more. But they feel like you're being hugged by a thousand chinchillas.

Lindsey feels the chinchilla love.

Our neighborhood, unveiled

Chris Baty — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:22:27 +0000

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

Up from down under

Chris Baty — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 23:47:48 +0000

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

1.5 billion words: Could it out-grapple a ninja?

Chris Baty — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 21:28:34 +0000

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…

—Would lift 765 adults off the ground. Let's say each breath a person takes is made up of one half liter of air. And let's say that with each breath, a person can say ten words. By this count, 280 words can fit inside an average-sized (14-liter) party balloon. Mythbusters (love that show) found that it takes about 7,000 helium-filled balloons to lift a full-grown man off the ground. If people breathed helium, the breath it would take to say 1.5 billion words would fill enough balloons to lift 765 adults off the ground. To put it more poetically, though, that would be enough balloons to lift a man, a woman, a boy, and a girl off the ground from every single country in the world! (Whes)

—Would go around the earth about 2.104 times if each word was an egg and the eggs were lined up end to end. (bandie2010)

—Would take almost 2 years to watch and would stretch more than 70% of the Earth’s circumference if each word was written on a frame of 35mm movie film. 1.5 billion words would require 17,755 miles of film and playing at 24 frames per second. (kennlar)

—Would reach the bottom of Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench (the deepest part of the ocean) 1691 times if each of the 1.5 billion words was exactly 1/2 inch in length. And if each word weighed 1 ounce and were made of vegetation, there would enough food to keep about 312,500 adult elephants happy for one day. (griffin_fire777)

—Could go from Oakland to the North Pole, back to Oakland, and would nearly make it to the North Pole yet again. The average length of an English word is five characters. This works out to 1/4 of an inch in 12 point Times New Roman font. 1/4 of an inch per word times 1.5 billion words is 375 million inches. That's 31,250,000 feet, which works out to 5918.6 miles. Let's start in Oakland, CA. We start writing these 1.5 billion words right next to each other, and head north. We reach the (geographic) North Pole, turn around, and keep going. That's how far 1.5 billion really is. (Thunderlord)

—Could wrap about halfway around the earth, and almost twice around the moon when each word is stacked end to end! If the average length of a word in the English language is 4.5 letters, and the default typeface of our world is Times New Roman in 12 point, an average word would be about 2/5th of an inch long. Multiply that by 1.5 billion, and you get 600 million inches (50 million feet or 15,240,000 meters). And that's not even including people with large handwriting or who have a different typeset than the default. That amount of words is taller than the Burj Dubai, the world's tallest man made structure by 21552 times!

And length-wise, if you've written 50K, you've reached 1667 ft (that sounds a little familiar for some reason). Height-wise, 833 ft! Amazing. That's taller than the Empire state Building, all on your own. (Wowey)

—Could get you two and a half trips to the Earth's core... three-fourths around Earth's equator... three times (nearly) around the Moon's equator. Assuming average word length of 2 cm (12 point font), converting to meters and then kilometers, 1.5 billion words is only 30,000 km. If you printed all those words out (assuming standard US paper and double line spacing) and assumed 50,000 words = 175 pages each. You would need 5,250,000 pages. Assuming a ream is 500 sheets and each ream is 2 inches tall... 10,500 reams. 21,000 inches. One story equals 106.75 inches so the height of the paper would be: 197 stories tall. That’s a whole heck of a lot of trees. Better edit electronically first! (Apollo16)

—Could fill 2 DVDs worth of storage. The average number of characters in an English word is 5. Multiply that by 1.5 billion and we have 7.5 billion characters. It takes one byte to store one character on the computer. So that is 7.5 billion bytes. Simplifying that we get about 7 GB of storage. That works out to 2 DVDs worth of storage or 10 CDs or 5, 087 3.5" floppy disks. If you add an extra character per word for spaces and punctuation it's 8.4 GB. That's 2 DVDs, 12 CDs or 6,104 3.5" floppy disks. (jlwatt)

—Is enough to write the Magna Carta (2500 words) 600,000 times and enough to write the US Constitution (slightly over 4000 words) over 300,000 times and the UN charter (just shy of 7000) over 200,000 times. And the longest document I was able to find (you will LOVE this), the United States Tax Code (2.8million words in 2004) more than 500 times. (AdonisNimbus)

—Would be 6 million pages long! If a standard printed book has 250 words per page, a book with the words from all of us Nanoers would total 1.5 billion words. I did some research to find out the thickness of standard paper used in publishing books, and it is approximately .0048 inches/one sheet. So, six million pages would be 28,000 inches long, which is 2,400 feet, which is 800 yards or eight football fields long. So, the total thickness of 1.5 billion words printed would be the length of eight football fields. W-o-w! (LifeofaSpark)

—Would bring us back to 1960, if we could travel back in time a second for every word. If we could travel back a year for every word, complex organisms are just beginning to evolve. Michael Jackson's album Thriller, best selling album worldwide, sold 108 million copies. Sell every word written for NaNoWriMo and you'd sell almost 14 Thrillers. That is 5 words written for every person in the USA and 1.13 words written for every person in China. The addition of words to the world is 240 times the estimated addition of people to the world. (Prof.Becket)

—If each word spans 590 yards/1528 feet of course! Jupiter is 390,682,810 miles away (it varies greatly too).

—Would be three times the width of the Australian continent. I estimated the average word to be 5 characters long, and approximately 0.35 inches wide on my monitor here when typed out. Multiply by 1.5 billion and the word count stretches 8286 miles.
For a single insane person to type all 1.5 billion in one month, they would have to write at 2038333 words per hour, or 34722 words per minute, 24 hours a day for the entire 30 day period! At the aforementioned average of 5 characters per word (plus a space between them), this is equivalent to pressing a key once every 0.288 milliseconds. I would imagine one would wear out several keyboards in this endeavor. (jfarquhar)

—Would wrap around the equator about two and a half times (2.47 times, actually). Assuming that we're working with 12 pt Times New Roman, and the average word length is 5.2 characters, 1.5 billion words. If 1.5 billion words were printed out in manuscript form (1-inch margins, 12pt, double-spaced), you could lay the pages out end-to-end all the way from Brownsville, TX (the southernmost city in the state) to Kansas. Stacked up, these manuscripts would reach a height of 426 ft. All that paper would also weight as much as about 5 elephants, and that's not even counting the ink. 1.5 billion words would fill up 7,868 copies of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. And 5 elephants would definitely be enough to defeat a ninja. (Dracontiar)

—Would reach 15,000 kilometers (approx. 9,320 miles). With an average word length of 4.5 characters, (plus one space for each word, so we'll say 5), and a 12 point Garamond, which makes each word about 1cm long.

The current distance from the Earth to Jupiter is approximately 5.785 AU, which is about 865 million km. So our combined words would stretch 0.0000173 times the distance to Jupiter.
The weight of France is trickier, however if we instead use a 1:1 scale map of France, printed on the same paper as our NaNoNovels, we can turn it into a question of area. My 50,000 words are over 108 pages. That would mean 1.5 billion words would use 3,240,000 pages. The area of these, assuming they are, like mine A4, would cover about 202,000 square meters, so 0.2 square kilometers. France is about 675,000 square kilometers, meaning our NaNos are 0.0000003 times the size of France.

Research has shown that the average ninja has a chest size of 42 inches. Adding, say, an extra foot for each arm, that gives us 66 inches, which is about 170cm. Given our 15,000 km of words, we could wrap them around our ninja over 88 million times. I would say that this would probably be enough to subdue said ninja.

1.5 billion words is equivalent to:
1.8 million London buses
137 thousand American football fields
London to New York 3 times
The distance light travels in 0.05 seconds

—Will have gone through the Oxford English Dictionary 2433.1 times... IN A MONTH! According to the Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition, Volume 1. Oxford University Press, 1989), there are roughly 616,500 words in the English language.

The English translation of Tolstoy's War and Peace contains around 560,000 words. This means that the NaNoWriMo authors will have compiled collectively a word count equal to 2678.6 copies of War and Peace... IN A MONTH!

The longest novel in Latin or Cyrillic alphabets, according to Wikipedia, is a French novel entitled Artamène, by Madeleine and Georges de Scudéry, counting in at 2.1 million words. Upon hitting 1.5 billion words, we here at NaNoWriMo will have written the count of the longest recorded novel over again 714.3 times... IN A MONTH!

The Bible, both Old Testament and New combined, is comprised of 774,746 words. This means that at 1.5 billion words we will have written the complete span of the Bible 1936.1 times... IN A MONTH!
The word count of the complete Harry Potter books is 1,090,739. If you have them, go get them now and stack them up on your floor. At 1.5 billion words, here at NaNoWriMo we will have written 1,375.2 times the entire series... IN A MONTH! (Vampiryyn)

—Would carpet the entire area of Vatican City (the smallest state in the world). If we assume the average size of a word to be about 0.53 square inches in Times New Roman 34 point font, then 1.5 billion words = about 0.2 square miles.(Katiefish)

—Would be equivalent to writing 25% of the DNA inside one of our human cells (there is essentially 6 billion base pairs per cell). It took 13 years for the Human Genome Project to be completed (one of the goals being to sequence the DNA strand...essentially read it). NaNoWriMo wrote in one month what took science over 3 years to read for 25% of the DNA. (rmckinney)

—Would beat Chuck Norris. (mydoctorisbetter)

Guess who sent us a $2100 check?

Chris Baty — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 22:54:38 +0000

You did!

This week we had a huge moment in the office. The annual check from GoodSearch came, and it was enormous. Thanks so much to everyone who has been tirelessly GoodSearching on Office of Letters and Light's behalf. The money you raised will do a tremendous amount of good for NaNoWriMo and the Young Writers Program in 2009.

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

Chris

NaNoWriMo 2008: Off the charts

Chris Baty — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 01:18:36 +0000

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

A post for all the stats nerds out there

Chris Baty — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 05:46:56 +0000

As an anthropology major, I never thought I'd spend as much time as I do thinking about web servers. But over the last 10 years of NaNoWriMo, I've become completely obsessed with the way traffic flows through our sites. Russ and I have named all of our servers after coffee-growing regions in Ethiopia (the birthplace of coffee), and I love each of them like my little, roboty children.

In October and November, before I get out of bed in the morning, I grab the laptop and check our Google Analytics stats from the previous day. (For those of you who have real lives, Google Analytics is just a complicated hit-counter that tells you interesting things about the people who come to your website.)

From three years of Analytics stats, I've learned that we have very stable traffic patterns, but they're kind of weird compared to other sites. Basically we're pretty slow through the summer and early fall. In October traffic builds in a nonchalant, nothing-to-see-here-folks kind of way until October 31. At which point everyone in the free world suddenly appears on our site.

I have no idea where they come from. But faced with the onslaught of so many writers, cheerleaders, and curious onlookers, our roboty children tend to scream and run for the hills. And every year, Russ patiently coaxes them back to work with balloons and ice cream.

By November 3, the Great Drop-Off has begun, as thousands of the saner members of the NaNoWriMo community realize they have more sensible things to do than write an entire book in a month. From there, it's a pretty gentle slope down to December 1.

And that's our stable, weird traffic pattern. Because I thought it might be marginally interesting to those of you who are also obsessed with web traffic, I made a snapshot of what last October looked like on the NaNoWriMo.org site, and another one comparing this October to last October. Note: This doesn't include the Young Writers Program site traffic, which exhibits similar weather patterns but on a less stormy scale.

First up: October 1, 2007 through November 1, 2007.

October 1-November 1, 2007

And then this is what the last 30 days have looked like for us. The blue line is this year's traffic. The green line is traffic from the same day in 2007. That huge, sad, dip on October 1, 2008, is when one of our favorite children, Lekempti, died. (We brought him back to life a day later.)

September 23, 2008-October 23, 2008

Given those percentage increases from 2007, I think we're going to see an absolutely crazy November 1 spike this year. Hold on to your hats, everyone!

Anyone else out there have strange site traffic patterns they'd be willing to share? Post a link in the comments!

Chris