The Office of Letters and Light Blog

My Plans for Next Year

Last month, I took a very deep breath and sent an email to OLL participants about the fact that I will be stepping down as OLL’s Executive Director on January 19, 2012. I’m going to head off to write full-time.

Leaving this organization I love so much was a hard decision to make, and the sadness I’ve been feeling as I prepare to pass the Executive Director baton was soothed by all the encouraging emails, forums posts, and tweets I received in response to the news. (To those of you who promised to buy my book when it comes out—I’ve harvested your IP address and will be sending you an order form shortly.)

Whenever I tackle a new challenge, I like to create a timeline so I freak out a little less. Since some people (hi, mom!) got in touch to ask what I would be writing in my post-January life, I wanted to share my timeline with you for 2012.

So, here goes!

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Ten Tips on Starting a Nonprofit

One of my friends is about to launch her own nonprofit. She and I are getting together next week so I can share some of my questionable insights about starting and growing an organization. I’m already deeply concerned that I’ll lose track of time and spend our entire meeting walking her through various options for her office coffee grinder, so I wrote out ten things that I wanted to be sure to tell her. I thought it might be interesting to share them here, too.

If you’ve started an organization, what tips would you add to these? If you’re just starting out, what questions would you like answered?

Ten Tips on Starting a Nonprofit

1: It’s okay to not know what you’re doing. Industries change from new ideas, and new ideas come from people who weren’t taught how to do things the right way. It’s okay to be an outsider.

2: When you first start out, hire a graphic designer to create a professional logo for your company or organization. Good graphic design will shape the way people see your organization and will open a surprising number of doors. It’s magical, really, and it’s more affordable than you think.

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Farewell, Nancy! Hello, Sarah!

I’m sad to announce that a beloved member of our team, Nancy Smith, will be leaving OLL. Nancy won a creative writing fellowship, and she’s heading off to devote herself to full-time fiction writing. Nancy brought so much to the CL position and we owe her a tremendous thanks for all the work she put into making OLL better (and better-looking with her graphic-design talents!) over the past year.

The good news is that we’ve already found someone great to fill Nancy’s shoes. Our very own Special Projects Manager, Sarah Mackey, will be taking over as Community Liaison starting in early July. Sarah is a dream hire. She served as an all-star NaNoWriMo Municipal Liaison in Edmonton for many years, interned for us last summer, and has been doing fundraising and outreach projects for us part-time since then. Sarah is incredibly funny, a huge supporter of our programs, and she lives, eats, and breathes social media. She’ll be our first non-US full-time employee, and will be doing her work from a secret bunker in Canada.

As Community Liaison, Sarah will be overseeing our Municipal Liaison program for NaNoWriMo and Script Frenzy, running our Come Write In outreach to libraries and bookstores, captaining our Twitter and Facebook feeds, handling press stuff, and continuing to work closely with Tavia on the Night of Writing Dangerously (along with a million other projects).

Welcome on board, Sarah! And write like the wind, Nancy!

– Chris B.

Tea Bag Tag Writing Contest Winners

Holy cow! We received over 75 submissions for our first-ever Tea Bag Tag Writing Contest. Thanks to everyone who answered the call to contribute a mood-lifting message to the contest!

Yesterday afternoon, our fantastic intern Max put together all of the submissions and walked them next door to Sweet Adeline Bakeshop, where barista, cookie-slinger, and occasional tea vendor Amanda Blank reviewed them.

Amanda’s favorite kind of tea, by the way, is Aztec Sweet Chili.

Amanda’s job as the TBTWC judge was to pick the slogan that made her happiest. With so many uplifting and hilarious entries, the  task ended up being too difficult, so Amanda picked her favorite three.

So. The three First Place winners of our first-annual Tea Bag Tag Writing Contest are…

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Tea Bag Tag Writing Contest

I love discovering messages in unexpected places. One of OLL’s illustrators, Jesse Reklaw, includes a tiny update on his life in the fine print of every invoice he sends us. A note on a recent invoice said “I read Stephen King’s On Writing in the bath tonight. My bookmark fell into the tub.”

It seems like a lot of people and companies are really coming to embrace the joys of mini-messages, from drink companies sneaking factoids onto the underside of bottle caps to Taylor Swift dropping capital-letter hints about her song’s subjects in her liner notes.

Yogi brand teas, which we drink a lot of here in the office, have inspirational messages printed on every tea bag tag. It’s one of their great charms. We’ve endured 900 days of rain in Berkeley, and I’ve been relying on Yogi’s St. John’s Wort “Blues Away” tea to bring some sunshine to my brain despite the cloudiness overhead.

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Q&A with Blake Suarez, Camp NaNoWriMo Poster Designer

The NaNoWriMo Summer Fundraising Drive is coming early this year! Starting Wednesday, May 25, and running until we’re out of our limited-edition goodies, Wrimos will have a chance to launch our virtual novel-writing camp this summer, and fund new guts for the NaNoWriMo site so it can work better in the fall.

This is the most important fundraising drive we’ve done in a decade, and we hope you’ll chip in. All donors to the NaNoWriMo “Camp and Guts” fundraiser will get special, limited-edition goodies, including this amazing Camp NaNoWriMo mini-poster! The 11” by 17” masterpiece was designed by Blake Suarez. We chatted with Blake about the poster, and also put together some images of the poster’s evolution over the past month.

Blake, what’s your favorite part of the Camp NaNoWriMo poster?

I’m really digging the little fire and tents. When I first started the project I thought about recreating the approved sketch with just the different types of paper. I also wanted to keep it as simple as possible, so the first set of drafts were originally just the moon, mountains, and the fire and tents. A few trees and bears later though, I was happy to hear you all enjoyed it.

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Q&A with Wendy Bryan, NaNoWriMo bumper sticker artist

The NaNoWriMo Summer Fundraising Drive is coming early this year! Starting this Wednesday, and running until we’re out of our limited-edition goodies, Wrimos will have a chance to launch our virtual novel-writing camp this summer and fund new guts for the NaNoWriMo site so it can work better in the fall.

This is the most important fundraising drive we’ve done in a decade, and we hope you’ll chip in. All donors to the NaNoWriMo “Camp and Guts” fundraiser will get special, limited-edition goodies, including the first-ever NaNoWriMo bumper sticker! The 8.5” by 2.5” sticker features artwork by Wendy Bryan, of I Heart Guts. Wendy took a break from her gutsy illustration work to give us the scoop on the sticker.

Wendy, you designed the adorable heart on the NaNoWriMo bumper sticker. Do hearts really have mouths?

Yes, they do, but oddly enough organ mouths don’t show up well in X-rays and MRIs.

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The Wonders of the East

I recently journeyed by train though the Great Lands of the East: Pennsylvania, New York, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. On my trip I saw many wonders, and I would like to share some of those with you now.

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The Unsung Heroes of OLL Events

I’m going to be traveling to Pennsylvania this week to speak at Mercersburg Academy. I’ll be talking to the high school students there about the life-changing benefits of high-velocity prose.

I’m really looking forward to the visit. I’ve always felt that the thousands of high school students who take part in NaNoWriMo and Script Frenzy are the unsung heroes of the events. High school was the most hectic time in my life, and the fact that so many high schoolers bash out a novel or script while going to class, doing homework, taking part in extra-curriculars, applying to colleges, and dealing with pressures from family and friends is an inspiring testament to the fact that you can be busy and still find time to write.

In the comments, I’d love to hear from high school students who have taken part in Script Frenzy and NaNoWriMo. What advice would you give to another high school student tackling either event for the first time?

And to the students of Mercersburg Academy—I look forward to meeting you in the chapel on Friday. 

– Chris

Photo of the somewhat terrifyingly large chapel where Chris will be speaking courtesy of Flickr user EdSocialmedia

News on the KIMBIA-GuideStar Contest!

A month ago, we told you about our hopes of winning the KIMBIA-GuideStar contest. For the contest, the nonprofit that received the most endorsements from its volunteers and participants on the GuideStar site in February would walk away with $5,000 and a llama.

Okay, just $5,000. But still! We’ve been a fan of GuideStar for a long time—they’re a one-stop shop for people interested in learning more about a particular nonprofit. We’ve been on GuideStar since OLL was founded, and we’re in good company—most U.S. nonprofits also have a profile on the site as well.

We really, really loved the idea of adding participants’ stories to our GuideStar page and we also loved the idea of putting that $5,000 into our programs. So we shot up an e-flare on the OLL blog, and sent out an email to our Municipal Liaisons, Come Write In Librarians, and Young Writers Program educators, asking them to write something if they had time.

And then we crossed our fingers and waited.

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Meet our new Office Manager, Tupelo Hassman

We’re very excited to announce that Tupelo Hassman will be joining the OLL Team as Office Manager! Tupelo first took part in National Novel Writing Month in 2003, and she’s been a member of the Young Writers Program editorial advisory board since 2010.

Tupelo will be taking on the awesome responsibility of answering all our general emails for NaNoWriMo, Script Frenzy, and the Young Writers Program. She’ll also be in charge of keeping the office ship-shape, answering phones, filing, ordering supplies, running back and forth between the office and the fulfillment company, and preventing the mountains of packing supplies from devouring all of us.

Our fantastic intern Candace Cunard sat down with Tupelo yesterday and asked her a few questions.

Can you describe your typical day at the office?

This is only my third day, but I’ll do my best. I come in and say hi to everyone. Sometimes we exchange high-fives. Tavia gives me an incredibly organized list of action items, and I sit down and do them. At the moment, I’m doing a lot of website editing in preparation for the Script Frenzy launch, and I’m loving getting to know everyone and decorating my desk with small replications of animals.

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