NaNoWriMo :: NaNoWriMo Blog

Tavia and I are hanging out here in the office as Friday afternoon turns to Friday evening. I just finished putting together my hot new chair from Office Max (I've been sitting on one of those $35 IKEA specials that starts to crumble your spine after fifteen minutes), and we're listening to Belle & Sebastian's The Life Pursuit.

For NaNoWriMo 2007, we're going to be trying something new on the pep talk front.

Instead of having me write all of them, we're going to invite several dozen well-known novelists to pen the pep talks. When you sign up for NaNoWriMo in October, you get to pick the authors you'd like to get an email from during the month. That way, you could theoretically get a pep talk every day if you wanted, and hear from authors you admire.

One of the things I love about life after NaNoWriMo is getting back to novel reading. Does anyone else treat themselves to a book as their prize for surviving another month of frantic writing? Yesterday, I picked up This Book Will Save Your Life by A.M. Homes on the recommendation of the awesome ladies of Mrs. Dalloway's bookstore in Berkeley. It's exactly what I needed. I've never heard of the author before, but it looks like she has a billion books. Any A.M. Homes fans out there care to tell me which of her books I should tackle next? And what is everyone reading post-NaNo?

Fellow nonprofit nerds out there can relate to the elation that ripped through the NaNoWriMo office this morning when Tavia called the IRS and found out that our 501(c)(3) charity status had been approved.

It's been one of those amazingly full Augusts in NaNoLand. I can't believe how many great people we have starting work next week. Our new Managing Editor Tavia! Our new Young Writers Program Director Karlyn! Our new ML helper Megan! Designers are fine-tuning the site from four different directions, flash is being corrected, new icons are being built; a new credit card processing robot is slowly being lowered into the site from whatever planet these things come from. We have the 2006 posters in hand, and they are freaking gorgeous. Russ and I have become e-conjoined twins, and Erin's been hearing back from our wonderful Municipal Liaisons in far-flung corners of the globe who will soon be taking up the Whip of Literary Enlightenment and driving all of us onward to glory and painful bouts of caffeine poisoning.

You know what? Novel-writing guides scare the pants off me.

I know this is a little ironic coming from me. But they make me anxious because I'm afraid I'll learn some plot-production or story-pacing technique that is so undeniably brilliant that I'll never be able to escape its influence. Then I'll become a slave to the formula they provide, and my books will become even more clichéd and wooden than they already are. (I was traumatized for weeks when a screenwriter friend of mine pointed out that most movies use a three-act formula, with the main character hitting their nadir at the very end of the second act).

Hey! Who wants to come work for us?

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/eby/npo/190219562.html

Snip from the listing:

NaNoWriMo has been lucky enough to land some pretty great pop cultural cameos. There was our appearance in the unforgettable cinema classic Alex and Emma. And, uh, the time when we were...well...