The Office of Letters and Light Blog

It’s Recruiting Season!

Way back in the day when I joined NaNoWriMo, things were a little different. The year was 2002. There was no Facebook, no Twitter—heck, there wasn’t even a MySpace. Many of us were still connecting to the internet using dial-up, and laptops were a little harder to come by. (I was not wearing an onion on my belt. This blog post is making me feel about a million years old. 30 is the new 20, right? I’m still young and hip, I swear!)

We still had the website, of course, but things weren’t quite as slick then as they are now. And with only about 13,000 participants, the regional forums weren’t as hopping as they are today. So when I decided to sign up for NaNoWriMo, I figured the best way to ensure I wasn’t doing it on my own was to attempt to recruit pretty much everybody I knew.

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NaNoWriMo YWP’s (Early!) Launch

When NaNoWriMo.org triumphantly launched on Monday, the precocious Young Writers Program had already been up and running for a week. After all, there’s only so long you can wait when excited young authors are ready to get going. The YWP didn’t get fancy new innards this year (soon, we hope), but we are still pretty hyped about the 2011 site we put together.

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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 The Best Page Ever is still stored in our database (though it’s now unpublished, thankfully).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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Five Launch Lessons

Over the years, I’ve learned to enjoy NaNoWriMo site relaunches the way a winemaker might savor a fine vintage. It’s such a heady mix of flavors! There’s the bouquet of excitement, a slight grace note of terror, all undercut with a peppery finish of ripening HTML code.

This is the second year I’ve had the pleasure of watching relaunch from a distance, as the great NaNoWriMo Program Director Lindsey Grant worked with fearless tech lead Dan Duvall to oversee everything. Not being as directly involved in the process has given me a chance to reflect on all the lessons I’ve learned from site relaunches of years past. I would like to share some of those lessons with you now.

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Another Bestselling NaNo-Novel!

Well, folks, it’s happened again. A published NaNo-novel has made it onto the New York Times Bestseller list. Number five in fiction overall, and number two on the hardcover list. The book in question? The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern.

I have to admit, I was wary of this book. Compare anything to Harry Potter and my hackles immediately raise. Violently. That being said, I did pick it up the day it came out, and was rather pleased with what I found inside. It’s a wonderfully immersive romp, full of magical sights and sounds and, above all, the circus. Morgenstern is a master of description, and brings the circus to life in every way.

I had the pleasure of attending a reading of The Night Circus at The Booksmith earlier this month and, I have to say, it was one of the more interesting readings I’ve been to. There were magicians! And juggling! And streamers! It was almost like being at a real circus. But in a bookstore.

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What’s your favorite OLL shirt?

As you may have heard, we are celebrating the 13th year of NaNoWriMo with a very special sale. Through next Thursday, September 22, all t-shirts in the OLL store are just $13. It’s an opportunity to pick up a design you’ve always coveted at a nice price, or stock up on extras for winter-layering in November. Who needs a coat?

We really love all the shirts we’ve designed over the years, but we each have our own special favorites. Here, let us tell you about them. And once you’re done reading, be sure to post in the comments about your favorite OLL shirt!

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You should come to the Night of Writing Dangerously.

There are a lot of things I really love about my job here at the Office of Letters and Light, but probably my favourite is everything to do with the Night of Writing Dangerously. This year will be my third as the Write-a-thon Cruise Director, and my fourth attending the event.

The trouble with our annual fundraising gala is it is very hard to describe in words or even pictures. While those who have attended can speak to the experience (and I hope they will here in the comments), the atmosphere of the event is hard to distill into a snappy blog post.

Still, nobody ever said I didn’t like a challenge, so I’ll give it a whirl. Why? Because I want every single one of you out there reading this blog post to stop for a moment and think, really think, about whether you could raise $250 for the Office of Letters and Light and get yourself to San Francisco on November 20.

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A NaNoWriMo t-shirt, from us to you!

Press check, circa 2009.

Today I am making a pilgrimage to Babylon Burning Screenprinting. Every year around this time, someone from the staff goes there for a press check: the final proofing our of our annual t-shirt design.

Once the size of the art and the colors are given the final go-ahead, hundreds of shirts are printed and shipped off to our warehouse, where they’re packaged and mailed to Wrimos around the world. Like you!

It’s a very exciting step in the long process that is merch design.

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A Random Story Challenge

I had trouble coming up with blog post for this week, so I decided to leave my topic up to fate. Do you guys know that site “Wikipedia”? Well, in addition to lots of interesting facts about otters, it has a cool “Random Article” search function. A perfect resource for the idea-starved! (Take note for November, pantsers.) Here’s a quick story based on what it popped out for me today:

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Wrimo Celebrity Visits Office, Staff Rejoice

We love office visits from participants. (In fact, as I was writing those very words, a Wrimo walked through the door with a plate of brownie cupcakes!)

Some visits are planned, some not. And some carry with them a very special significance for us.

Last week, we had one one such visit from author Julia Crouch. She and her family were in town all the way from Brighton, and they stopped by to say hello. Julia brought us a copy of her book, Cuckoo, out in bookstores now from Headline UK… and drafted during NaNoWriMo!

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The Young Writers Program July Writing Contest: Results!

A couple of weeks ago, we announced the first annual Young Writers Program July Writing Contest. It was just a little idea—a way for our students to get in some writing during the summer. Almost 150 entries later, we’re proud to say that the contest was much bigger and better than we’d ever hoped.

Our only prompt was “Compose a brief story (300-word limit) that starts on a bright, sunny day.” The directions these kids and teens went with that simple concept were inspiring. We had sci-fi, horror, war, comedy, romance, and more—all unique takes and ideas. We were so impressed with everybody who submitted, and choosing a winner was a very hard task. Eventually we narrowed it down to three stand-outs…

Grand Prize Winner:

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An Interview with Kaat Vrancken

Kaat Vrancken has been publishing books—both fiction and nonfiction—for the better part of two decades, but 30,000 Words by Charlie is her first book (and the first published one that we know of) to put its titular character through a NaNo-like challenge!

We sat down with Ms. Vrancken (virtually) for a few words about the new book, and her work as an author.

Can you talk a little about your experience with NaNoWriMo?

Since 2007, I’ve been teaching creative writing for adults at an art school in Belgium. One of my students told me about NaNoWriMo, and that she participated every year. I was curious and read all about it on the website. But—to be honest—I didn’t believe that one could write quality fiction in one month. The next year I asked myself, “Why don’t you try it with your students?” We did it. And beautiful stories came out. It was a miracle.

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