The Office of Letters and Light Blog

Mark Your Calendars! ABNA is Coming!

On our 2011 edition of the “I Wrote a Novel, Now What?” page, we list a number of free contests and writing challenges that you can enter this year. One of them is the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, which is accepting submissions through February 5!

Wrimos are no strangers to the ABNA; scores have entered, many have reached the semi-finals and finals, and last year a Wrimo won!

That’s right.

In 2011, Jill Baguchinsky was the winner in the young adult fiction category for her novel, Spookygirl, which she drafted during NaNoWriMo!

This from Amazon:

The Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award brings together talented writers, reviewers, and publishing experts to find and develop new voices in fiction. The 2012 international contest will award two grand prizes: one for General Fiction and one for Young Adult Fiction. Each winner will receive a publishing contract with Penguin, which includes a $15,000 advance.

Open submissions for manuscripts will begin on January 23, 2012 and run through February 5, 2012. If you’re an author with an unpublished or previously self-published novel waiting to be discovered, visit CreateSpace to sign up for regular contest updates. See the official contest rules, or read details on how to enter.

If you plan to enter, share the details about your novel here! We’d love to hear all about your masterpiece manuscripts.

Good luck, novelists! We’re rooting for you!

– Lindsey

Happily Holidayed

I love the winter holidays. In spite of the persistent (and often very bad) music, the frenzied crowds, and the abundance of naughty foods that make me a little cuddlier by January 1, I still give the Thanksgiving-to-New Years stretch of serial holiday-time a thumbs up.

For me, it comes down to tradition, many of which have little to do with the actual holiday we’re celebrating and more to do with, well… the food.

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NaNoWriMo: A Writer’s Vacation from Nonfiction

Eleven months out of the year, I write nonfiction. I tend to write shorter-form essays that don’t necessarily have a ton of dialogue or require the carefully crafted plot arc that a traditional novel requires.

So November presents itself as a delightful opportunity to take a break from my usual writing projects and subject matter, and exercise other writing muscles: dialogue, character development, long-form narrative arc, and the simple act of fabrication.

Now that the month has ended, I am slipping back into my nonfiction writing practice, trying to meet a deadline I conveniently ignored in favor of my luxurious November of fiction-writing. And right now, working on my nonfiction project feels a lot like stepping out of a bubbling hot tub and cannonballing right into the deep end of the swimming pool.

I know a lot of your are starting the revision process on this or a previous NaNo-novel. For those of you starting—or returning to—a new or different project in another genre, how do you make the transition? Are you gasping from the shock of it? Please share your project-hopping tips with me!

– Lindsey

Photo by Flickr user Matt Lehman

NaNoWriMo’s Gasp-Inducing 2011 Stats!

The end-of-event stats blog post has become one of my favorite NaNoWriMo traditions (and I derive great pleasure from looking at these stats posts from years past, too…). I hope you enjoy devouring this year’s numbers as much as I enjoyed compiling them!

General Stats Round Up!

For NaNoWriMo main:

• 256,618 participants, up roughly 28% from 2010’s total of 200,530 writers.
• We wrote a total of  3,074,068,446 words, up 7% from 2010’s collective word count of 2,872,682,109.
• This averaged out to 11,979 words per person!
• We had 36,774 winners, giving us a 14% win rate!

For NaNoWriMo’s Young Writers Program:

• 81,040 participants, up 19% from 2010’s total of 68,710.
• We wrote a total of 368,143,078 words up 40% from 2010’s collective word count of 262,303,074.
• This averaged out to 7,199 words per person.
• We had 16,334 winners, giving us a never-before-precedented 32% win rate!

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Unexpected Inspiration

Thanksgiving can be a tough speed bump in the November noveling process.

I’ve found that any momentum I may have worked up over the first three weeks gets slowed—or completely halted—by the festival of turkey and family time. I’d like to blame the tryptophan, but I think I am just an easily distracted person. Especially when I am being distracted by food and loved ones.

Compound this will my questionable decision to take my parents, in town from Atlanta, north to wine country this past weekend. It had the very real potential to sink my already sagging word count. I brought my AlphaSmart in the car with me, hoping that the two-hour drive there and back, plus evenings by the fireside would afford me the time I needed to work on my novel.

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Meet Our Team: Emily Bristow, Captain of Capital Ideas

Emily has long been a key player in the OLL-iverse as both a long-time ML and a remote staff member. You may know her in the forums as lazym. And now you can get to know her even better! I am proud to present the brilliant Emily Bristow.

Emily, how long have you been participating in NaNoWriMo?

I’ve participated (and won!) every year since 2002. This is, incredibly, my 10th  NaNo. I was a Municipal Liaison (ML) for the Austin, Texas region—go Penguins!—from 2004 through 2010.

When did you come on as the Captain of Capital Ideas? And, what is that exactly?

I became the ML Captain of Capital Ideas in 2008. NaNo was growing fantastically from year to year, and to support that growth we needed to get more serious about fundraising. Chris Baty asked me to lead a group of MLs to brainstorm ideas, hence the “Captain.” I thought it would be fun to compare regional donations the same way we compare word-count totals, so with the help of the amazing, multi-talented Lousy Writer 13, we launched the Donation Derby contest in 2009.

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The Life of a Winner’s Shirt

The 2011 Winner’s Shirt is now available in the online store!

I got to bring this shirt from design concept all the way to completed shirt, and I thought I’d take you through the journey.

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Meet Our Team: Rob Diaz, Ticket Master

Meet Rob Diaz, a volunteer extraordinaire lending his time and talents all the way from New Jersey! No doubt you’ve met Rob in the forums as Lousy Writer 13. Now learn more about the man behind the username…

Rob, how long have you been participating in NaNoWriMo? Do you participate in Script Frenzy, too?

This will be my sixth NaNoWriMo—2006 was my first year. My wife and children participate as well. I’ve tried for the past few years to get my kids’ teachers to bring the YWP into the classroom and for the first time I think one of them is (my son’s fourth grade teacher). We look forward to November every year! On a personal note, my favorite number is 13 and with this year being the 13th NaNoWriMo, I expect big, fantastic things!

I have intended to participate in Script Frenzy each year as well, but I seem to end up traveling for work or with other deadlines during April so it hasn’t worked out. I am very comfortable with scriptwriting and have had several scripts produced, so it is truly about the time factor. I have an idea for a musical that I want to write for Script Frenzy one of these years, so hopefully I’ll get that done some time. My daughter is the only one in my family who has won Script Frenzy so far (a fact of which she reminds us every year in and around April).

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Meet Our Team: Heather Dudley, Forums Moderator

NaNoWriMo has a whole team of folks that make the November magic happen from afar. You’ve seen them in the forums, and heard their names mentioned in NaNoVideos and emails, but we thought it was time to put a face—and a story—to their names.

Up first: Heather Dudley (also known as Dragonchilde), NaNoWriMo’s Forums Moderator.

Heather, how long have you been moderating NaNoWriMo’s forums?

I started volunteering with Cybele the same here I first became an ML—2003. Wow. That’s um… a lot of years. I volunteered mostly in the “Mechanics, Logistics, and Other Technical Stuff” forums for five years, and have been staff moderator for three. When I try to add up how many hours I’ve spent on the NaNoWriMo website, my ears start smoking and Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” starts playing in the background.

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Title Before Plot?! I Must Be Nuts.

My first two NaNos, I had no inkling what I was writing about until the eleventh hour when I sat down in my Halloween costume, AlphaSmart in hand, and started writing.

This year, with November a mere 13 days away, I have a title and loosely formed plot for my NaNo-novel. This was the case last year, as well. But unlike 2010’s pre-November plan, my title came first this time around.

Nobody Likes Brazil Nuts.

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A Technical Education

Three years, 2 months and 24 days ago, I came on board at OLL as the first employee to hold the title of Community Liaison. I had a writing and business background, but I was pretty weak on the technological know-how.

 Lucky for me, overseeing volunteers didn’t expressly require that I have great programming chops or anything. But it did require that, in my very first week, I learn some rudimentary HTML.

The first thing I created on the site was called The Best Page Ever, and featured photographs of a bearded man and a kitten, as well as a list of my favorite foods in descending order. (I aced the HTML portion of the test, but accidentally published the page, to the confusion of a few very vigilant Wrimos.)

Fast forward three years. The Best Page Ever is still stored in our database (though it’s now unpublished, thankfully). And we are pulling the curtains back on the second website I’ve ever helped create: the brand new Rails-built NaNoWriMo.org (the first being the Camp NaNoWriMo website, released this summer).

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