NaNoWriMo Blog - No Plot! No Problem!

30 Covers: Keeping the Ball Rolling

OLL Interns — Thu, 5 Nov 2009 14:43:14 -0800

Good afternoon Wrimos across the globe! Today is November 5th and the covers just keep on coming. Hopefully, so do your words! In a perfect world, you should be at just over 8,000 words. I, personally, am at just over 1,000. Unfortunate, but we will persist! That's what Congress-man would want us to do:

30 Covers: Day Four

Meet John Foe - MartianMenace

Charles Wilson Schmitz, newly-elected Representative from Missouri's 2nd District, discovers shortly after arriving in the Nation's Capital, that he's developed superpowers! Deciding to put his new talents to (literally) good use isn't going to be easy though - especially with a public career to maintain and a real villain lurking in the wings. Can he keep a secret identity while followed by political pundits, lobbyists, and the media? Can he save the day, get the girl, and still hold on to his elected office? This looks like a job for . . . Congressman!

Again, get to the forum during a writing break and bend Chris from Fwis' ear!

30 Covers, 30 Days: The Big Three!

OLL Interns — Tue, 3 Nov 2009 15:22:21 -0800

Welcome to your daily edition of 30 Covers, 30 Days! You can check out a neat interview one of our very own Wrimos did with Chris from Fwis if you click right here.

30 Covers: Day Three

The Beauty of a Grid - delucaa

When he inherits a locked box that has no key from an unknown relative, an adopted young man must travel across the country in search for his real parents in hopes that they will provide the answers about not only the box, but his childhood of which he has no memory. While battling his obsessive compulsive disorder along the way, he encounters characters from all walks of life and gets a glimpse of the real America in this poignant tale of adventure, redemption, and self discovery.

Get over to the forums if you get a chance and let Chris know what you think!

And we hope noveling is going great for all of you! Mine's coming in fits and starts, but I think I'm on the verge of finding a groove. How're you guys doing?

- Tim

30 Days, 30 Covers: Kick-off!

OLL Interns — Mon, 2 Nov 2009 14:25:54 -0800

Happy November! It's officially the first week of National Novel Writing Month and we're already seeing some pretty impressive word counts. Keeping up with all you enthusiastic novelists is Chris Papasadero, at Fwis; here are the first two cover designs! And make sure to check out the forum where you can shower praise upon these masterpieces, share any thoughts you might have, or just cheer Chris on.

Chris will also be posting these images in the "30 Covers, 30 Days" forum every day. That's the place to check if you want to stay up-to-the-minute and if you want to get a little insight into why Chris chose to do these covers the way he did. Anyway, I'll shut up now and let the covers do the talking:

30 Covers: Day One

"The Business" - Solita

All Victoria “Vicky” Williams wanted to be growing up was a professional wrestler. After enduring years of negativity from her friends and family, she says goodbye to her old life and enrolls into wrestling school. For the next ten years, Vicky pays her dues in the business through physical pain, emotional turmoil and mental stress. She works alongside the boys, learns the ropes, holds her own and gains everyone's respect.

So when she finally gets her big break in the biggest company, the WWA (World Wrestling Alliance), it wounds Vicky that locker room politics lavish all the attention on another woman wrestler: Lara Desrosiers, a supermodel who won her contract in a talent competition. Vicky keeps fighting though, maintains her ringwork ethic and promo skills while the higher-ups continue to favor Lara’s beauty and sex appeal. But when Lara endures her first in-ring injury, one that reminds Vicky of her own years ago, the two develop a bond that rarely forms in such a hard, unforgiving business like this-- a bond tested by too many injuries and too many drugs.

30 Covers: Day Two v.2

"Traffic Lights" - fadingwind

Imagine a world, not far in the future, where everyone's born with a visible, permanent, unchanging aura. But there are only two colours: green for good and red for evil. Everyone's got to be one thing or another. Or so the government claims. In order to maintain the order of society, if you're born red, you're taken away from your parents immediately-- killed, used in experiments for medical research... who knows? You're just never seen again.

Amber, born with a red aura, was hidden away by her parents at birth. She grows up a lonely child, trapped in her small home, but the year she turns sixteen, she realises that maybe, just maybe, she doesn't have to be alone. Things don't have to stay like this. There are others like her out there. Are they all evil? Is she evil? Are good and evil really ever that simple?

And again, make sure to check out Fwis' Cover Blog. The guys at Fwis critique current cover design; it's a great way to get a bit of working knowledge of the trials and travails of graphic designers the world over.

- Tim

The November 1 spike!

Chris Baty — Mon, 2 Nov 2009 08:35:32 -0800

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

An interview with Sam Van Hallgren, creator and original host of WrimoRadio about his return to noveling

OLL Interns — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:20:11 -0700

Q: Sam, you were the creator, producer, and host of the NaNoWriMo podcast WrimoRadio from its inception until 2006. During your tenure as producer, you managed to get such august personages as George Saunders and This American Life's Ira Glass to read NaNoWriMo participants' novel excerpts on the air. Your oversight of the podcast was sadly cut short when you were kidnapped by pirates and eventually traded to a family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin for three apples and a jug of grog*. What have you been doing since your escape?

A: This might be the Stockholm syndrome talking, but I'm happy to report that my (regretful) time away from NaNoWriMo has been happy, fulfilling and productive. (Thanks, Pirates!) In a nice parallel to NaNoWriMo's literary success stories, it was my work on the NaNoWriMo podcast (and a podcast/radio show I co-hosted for a couple of years, Filmspotting) that helped me get a for-real job at a for-real radio station. Before my family's recent move to the Charlotte, NC, area, I spent three years as producer and, more recently, program director at listener-supported 88Nine RadioMilwaukee (think the world's best Pandora channel + This American Life). Also in that time I got hitched, bought a house and (with a good deal of help from my wife) had a son, David. And I learned to juggle apples while drunk on grog. And built up an immunity to iocane powder.

Q: You've taken a five-year hiatus from novel writing, but you're back and vying for your fifth NaNoWriMo win this year. What inspired your return to the field of high-velocity noveling?

A: By the time I finished my fourth novel in 2004, I honestly felt like I'd learned a thing or two about how to write a novel. (That is, how to write a novel ... in a month. Is there a difference?) And as I looked to the future, I imagined that every November would be spent writing a terribly plotted novel with lousy dialogue and the occasional, awkward sex scene. In fact, I looked forward to it. Despite plans to return to NaNoWriMo every year since 2005, life always managed to intervene. Skip ahead to Fall, 2009. I'm a stay-at-home dad with a part-time radio gig in beautiful Davidson, NC. My wife, who has never lived through a novel writing month, is naively supporting my return to competitive noveling. I never meant to give it up for so long. And now as November becomes visible on the horizon, I find myself as nervous as I was the first time.

Q: What tips do you have for first-time NaNoWriMo participants?

A: Everything I learned about novel-writing I learned from Chris Baty. So I apologize in advance if any of this sounds familiar.

1) It's worth it. It's really, really worth it. Especially for first-timers. Don't tell my wife, but there really isn't anything in my life that I can compare to writing my first NaNoWriMo novel. Because once you cross that 50k line, all the anguish (and tedium and doubt and sleep deprivation and nerves rattled from caffeine ingestion and lonely lonely hours away from family and friends and missing out on at least 4 episodes of 30 Rock), immediately turns to exaltation. There may have been times in your life that were Hell to go through and once they were over you wondered, "Was it worth it?" Well finishing your first novel won't feel like that. I promise. You'll just feel ... bliss. And awe. You'll feel like your heart is too big for your chest. Like you just fell in love for the first time. And the size of all that bliss and awe will be in direct proportion to the number of people you told in October and November that you were writing a novel. Which brings us to:

2) (which you have already learned from Chris) Tell everyone that you're writing a novel. It will shame you into actually writing a novel and the # of people that you tell that you're writing a novel is = to the # of people you get to tell that you WROTE a novel. Make it a big-ass number.

3) 26.2. Before I ever ran a marathon, I compared novel writing month to running a marathon. Turns out, I was mostly right. Except running a marathon disrupts far more of your life than a month. Is at least as exhausting. Is, yes, exhilarating. Makes you vomit. But here's the lesson: my goal when I ran my first (and only) marathon was to finish. If I had decided that my goal was to finish my marathon in, say, under four hours, and I finished in 4 hours 10 minutes ... I would have felt like a failure. After training for months and months and punishing my body for 26.2 miles. The only thing you gotta do is write 50k words. Let everything else go. If you do that, there's no failing.

4) You're Cecil B. DeMille. Cast thousands. This isn't going to work for everyone, but I learned by novel number four that the more characters I had the better. My instinct the first couple times out was to have a single protagonist. Boy did I hate those characters at the end of my first two Novembers. My next two novels had at least a half dozen characters. Get bored with one, move on to the next. Keep juggling. I kept track of characters and other story details in the footnotes.

5) When it doubt, take a road trip. I think every one of my novels contains a road trip (or two.) You won't beLIEVE the freaks you'll run into on the road.

6) When you stop writing for the day, don't stop at the end of a chapter; it'll just mean looking at a blank page the next day. Give yourself a couple sentences or a paragraph or two to get you going every day.

7) Arrange with a novel-writing friend to have your characters meet each other somewhere. (This is a lot easier if your characters share the millennium and/or galaxy.) In 2004, a friend and I agreed to have our characters meet each other in Paris. Between getting to Paris, hanging out and seeing the sights, getting back home, I probably had about a third of my novel written. I've already arranged with a couple of first-timer NaNo participant friends to do something similar this year. However long an episode it turns out to be, it can be a nice pick-me-up, especially in the creative wasteland that Week 2 can be.

8) Celebrate celebrate dance to the music. If you don't take part in any of your region's meet-ups during November, make a point of going to the post-November celebration at the end. Even if you don't finish. You will rarely in your life have so much in common with a room full of people. If only every bar was filled with NaNoWriMo participants, the world would be a better place.

Q: Do you know what you'll be writing about this year?

A: I was finishing up Don DeLillo's Underworld not long ago and I thought, I should do something like THIS for NaNowriMo (yeah, right). And then I picked up George Saunders' most recent collection of stories, In Persuasion Nation, and I thought, Or, you know, maybe I could try something that THIS (not a chance). And then for some reason I started reading Catcher In The Rye and I was like, Damn, I forgot just how good this is, I should really try and write something like THIS (many have tried ... and failed). I've never started a November with a plan. I just start writing. I admire the writers who have a vision and see it through. In fact, I think of them as "actual writers." But at this point I think it would make me nervous to have a plan. To chaos! To chance! To inspiration! All hail, NaNoWriMo!

*Sam was later discovered to have made much of this up.

Amy

DeKalb Wrimo Collage-o-rama 2009

OLL Interns — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:32:51 -0700

Every year, we here at NaNoWriMo Headquarters are astounded by the breadth of your creativity. Wrimos in DeKalb, Illinois spotlight one more way to get that novel-writing juice flowing! We're going to let them take it away:

Here in DeKalb, our Wrimos can be divided into two camps: the plotters versus the fliers (as in fly by the seat of the pants). Our plotters use software like yWriter, Scrivener, Excel and even program their own computers to run orbital calculations on their imaginary worlds. (We forgive you Apollo16.) Our fliers are looking for anything to write with including crayons on November 1st.

The Plotters: Has anyone seen my micrometer? Here are kyronae, viewtiful_justin, trie_squid and modius13 working on their novels... or maybe faking it.

The Fliers: Anybody got a pencil? Here are trie_squid, sunnoah, sunne, julieb8rib and Mary Kowalski.

Because of this disparity of styles, we needed to come up with an activity where all could benefit and have fun. Two years ago, julieb8rib (A.K.A. Julie Spahn) suggested a Collage-o-rama based on an activity she had participated in at a conference hosted by Jenny Crusie. So last year, a small group of the DeKalb Wrimos met at our local library and collaged away. Here is an example of a finished collage from last year:

A 2008 Finished Collage

So how does one collage? First get scissors, glue sticks, poster board, and a recycle bin full of old magazines. Then supply food and drink and lots of space to spread out...and have everyone rip or cut out images and words that appeal to them and glue them onto a piece of poster board. That’s it!

Collage-o-rama 2009 in DeKalb, IL.: DeKalb does a candy exchange every year with Perth, Australia. The Aussie lollies are door prizes for attendees. Here we have Apollo16 raffling off the goodies with Sunne being one of the big winners.

This year, we had to relocate to a science lab room with nine large, flat tables to accommodate all eighteen participants. In a new twist, trie_squid set up a list on the chalkboard so that all eighteen sets of eyes could look for specific images that their fellow writers were seeking. Some of the images being called for included tentacles, watches, unhappy marriages, anything 1920’s, 40’s noir, tattoos and painfully handsome men who have an evil side.

DeKalb Wrimos arriving and setting up the materials for the Collage-o-rama.

So...why might you want to collage? Looks kinda girly to you? Well, the fliers found that after they had finished their collages, they could see main themes and plot elements literally popping out before them. Last year, Mary Kowalski (one of our Co-MLs) had no idea why she kept picking medical terms and scary pictures like hypodermics until it dawned on her that one of her main characters had a serious medical condition. This realization made the rest of her plot fall into place. Even our plotters found new nuances in the personalities of their characters and filled plot holes before they could develop into something serious.

Whee71 and his Dad selecting images for their collages

As Apollo16 (A.K.A. Kathy Kitts our other Co-ML) explains, “You don’t have to be artsy, you just have to approach the activity with an open mind while thinking vaguely about your story. And if you are completely clueless, just go with images and words that appeal to you and your story will reveal itself to you.”

So how do the collages compare to the actual novels at the end of November? So far, they have been right on the money. Apollo16 describes her experience from last year, “I’m a plotter so I didn’t think a collage would do much for me but I was wrong. A character just appeared out of no where on my board and overthrew my original villain. And that is literally what happened in my novel.” This year, CheekyAmerican brought a framed corkboard instead of poster board. “I want to be able to hang my collage and look at it during the entire month... to help me focus.”

Therefore, we invite all our Wrimo colleagues to raid the recycle bin and create a collage for themselves. You might be pleasantly surprised at what your subconscious has to say about your NaNo-novel. Good luck and happy noveling!

The DeKalb Wrimos

How are you all planning for your November novels? Have you been to a regional event like this yet? Anybody going to attempt collaging? So many questions, we know, but we want to hear your answers!

November gadget meltdown starting early this year?

Chris Baty — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:34:39 -0700

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 15:29:26 -0700

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

Free, 250-word contest for YA authors!

OLL Interns — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 17:26:43 -0700

Lately, I've been obsessed with Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games, a book about a bunch of teenagers who are stuck in an arena and have to fight to the death, kinda like gladiators, or maybe high school.

Either way, it seems like YA fiction just keeps getting better and better! So if you love YA as much as I do, listen up, 'cause there's something pretty awesome in the works... namely the first ever 250 Word YA Pitch Competition! In honor of NaNoWriMo, the folks at Serendipity Literary Agency, Sourcebooks, and Gotham Writers' Workshop are coming together to host this contest, which will last from 12:01 AM EST on November 1, 2009-11:59 PM EST on November 30, 2009!

So what's this contest about, exactly? Well, all you have to do is send in a title and 250 words from the opening of your YA novel. As you'll probably be writing these 250 words (and many, many more) during NaNoWriMo, it's pretty much a cut-and-paste contest! (Okay, so not really.) That's it! No other material will be accepted for judging, and you can only enter the contest one time, so make every word count!

The top 20 submissions will be read by editors at HarperCollins, Penguin, Harlequin, Random House, and Sourcebooks. Those judges will then pick the top five winners out of that twenty, and the top five winners will receive commentary on their submissions as well as a 15-minute, one-on-one pitch session with YA literary agent Regina Brooks! During that one-on-one pitch session, winners can pitch a project they have in the works and receive feedback, or they can ask those burning questions we all have about the publication process.

What else? Oh, right - like all the best things in life (re: sunshine, some really cute puppies, and NaNoWriMo), it's free. All you have to do is fill out that form with your mind-blowing 250-word excerpt, and sit back and wait for the accolades and literary fame. Even J.K. Rowling never had it quite so easy. Unfortunately, you do have to be 13 years old or older to enter the contest. I have to admit, I didn't really want to write this blog post because I didn't want to tell anyone else about this amazing opportunity, but Chris made me. Follow the link for more info (or don't... your loss is my gain! Mwahaha.) :)

http://www.writingclasses.com/ContestPages/YAPitch.php

And start polishing those 250 words (and title!) now because I'm already halfway there!

Grace

Where I Write: Megan Allen

OLL Interns — Fri, 9 Oct 2009 19:43:36 -0700

My writing space is fairly new, but improved! Multiple notebooks sit waiting with info already written in them, or waiting for notes to be scratched into the paper. Two binders sit with random information found from the internet, and another with notes and excerpts from my current novel. A drawer and shelf space are packed with my drawing tablet, reference books, language dictionaries, candles, games, and anything else I could need that will keep me writing for hours. It's all warmed up for this year's NaNoWriMo. There's even enough room to put a plate of food on the desk while the keyboard sits in my lap, so I really don't have to take time out from writing. And all of my personal decorations make it seem like home, even though it's situated right in my bedroom.