NaNoWriMo :: NaNoWriMo Blog

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

As I mentioned earlier, since I hit 50,000 miles on my car on November 1st, I decided to make my goal whatever my mileage was on the odometer on November 30th.

Yes, I was very careful about driving this month, so I only racked up an additional 370 miles for my word count goal.

It all ended with smiles. Literally.

My end tally was 50,374.

The last line (which I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I don't always write in order):

And I smiled.

I hope your NaNoWriMo has a happy ending.

This is a new thing for me. Being behind, I mean. Well, I take that back. I was behind in 2005, but let's be honest. I had a bit of a handicap: I gave birth to a baby that November 16. I did get 18k though, so I wasn't all that behind.

This year, though, my word count is woeful. As we speak, my meter stands at 30156. Turns out the demands of novelling with two small children is a lot tougher than I imagined. Moderating the forums isn't the problem... it's moderating my own kids that's the problem!

I need 19,844 words to win. For you following along at home, that means I need to write around 5,000 words a day to win.

Whew. AND I have to have Thanksgiving dinner in there somewhere. Looks like I'll be writing with one hand, eating turkey with the other. All of this while wrangling two small children (3 years and 8 months), tending the forums, cleaning the house, doing the laundry, running errands, and--

Wait. You know something? I can do this. Are you behind too? Let's cross the finish line together. I know we can do it... Drop whatever you're doing, and start writing. Even if you only manage a hundred words... that's a hundred you didn't have before.

Race you to the finish line!

On November 1st, as I'd planned, my car's odometer turned over to 50,000. (With a bit better planning I would have preferred November 30th but that's what I get for going up to visit my Office of Letters and Light buddies in September.)

So it was there and then that I changed my personal word goal for my 2008 novel. I will write as many words as my car has on its odometer on November 30th.

And to make it easier for me to meet this goal, I walked to my Write In today - it's a win-win, I'm driving less and getting more exercise!

Don't worry, I didn't take that photo while driving. I had help.

NaNoLantern

National Novel Writing Month just might be easier to fit into your schedule this year.

Only one other time in history (2003) has the calendar cooperated so nicely with swift noveling pursuits. November 2008 starts on a Saturday and ends on a Sunday. This means that there are five weekends in November 2008. This means that there are ten weekend days.

This is great news to those who need the weekends to catch up on noveling. (As I am one of those people.)

For those in North America we get another special treat added to this five weekend month, an extra hour on Sunday morning for Daylight Savings Time.

2008 loves novelists.

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

The best thing about our new, giant poster tubes is not that we can now fit a mug, a t-shirt, and a poster into one cylindrical shipment, but that the tubes are wide enough for us to play robot arms.

That is right! At 4" in diameter (as opposed to our old tubes' measly 3"), these poster tubes can accommodate an adult human arm! This really changes things here at the office. We haven't tried it yet, but we'll let you know how our game of robot legs works out.

I have secured an interview with one of these tubes, so stay tuned for the upcoming daily Q&A. It is bound to be controversial.

And when you receive your giant poster tube in the mail, stick your arm in it! Snap a picture and email to us! We're starting a new series: "Robot arms from around the world."

I felt like one of the great novelists of old, bravely pursuing storytelling fame without the distractions of being a parent.

NaNoWriMo compelled me to convert our little-used travel trailer into a writer's cabin. It was perfect: away from the household hullabaloo yet within reach of the wireless AP, with a little fridge, and a table to set up on. I took my dinners out there and pounded the keyboard far into the night, bottle of scotch at the ready. I felt like one of the great novelists of old, bravely pursuing storytelling fame without the distractions of being a parent. Now, having experienced my absence while I was out writing my NaNoNovel, my wife encourages me to move into it permanently. Yay! Thank you NaNoWriMo!

—Don

Dreaming about writing for three decades, Don grew up in the East Bay but now resides in bucolic splendor far from the city.

Wanna share your story? Send it in!