It's NaNoWriMo Time Again!

Bet you're wondering what the acronym stands for. Well, here it is - National Novel Writing Month. And what month is National Novel Writing Month? Why it's November of course. It has been the same month every year since it's inception in 1999. Actually that's not true. The first year it was held in July with only 21 participants including its creator Chris Baty from the San Francisco Bay Area.

Year two, a friend of Chris' offered to built an actual NaNoWriMo site for free. The grand event was then moved to the month of November. This time, 140 people participated, most of who lived outside of the Bay Area, including some from Canada and places even further. NaNoWriMo had become international already!

Besides making improvements to better the official site, Chris created a NaNoWriMo Yahoo club, so that all the participants from all the far-flung areas could get to know each other. Theoretically, the group was working great ... until ... the members started asking questions about rules. Then Chris so graciously replied, "Rules? Who had time for namby-pamby rules? A literary revolution was afoot here, people! Write first! Ask questions later! A novel-writing tornado was ripping through our very heartlands! When a tornado is approaching, do you waste time pondering what rules may govern its mighty winds?" (He has such a way with words, doesn't he?)

After much care thought (in a short amount of time, about twenty minutes mind you) the rules were established. Write a 50,000-word novel from scratch by oneself (no co-authoring) in one months time - November 1st - November 30th was the first major criteria of this writing event of great magnitude. Then, participants are required to email their novel into Headquarters by midnight, Pacific Time, at the end of the month for word-count verification purposes. If this was not done, disqualification was the outcome.
Everything went well and things seemed enormously promising for the following year.

Promising to say the very least. Five thousand people from all over the world took part! Year four saw 14,000 participants. The database for year five was 25,000. 42,000 writers showed up for year number six. It also marked the debut of NaNoWriMo's partnership with Room to Read, the international children's literacy program.

Last year, year seven was the best year ever. To add to the regular NaNoWriMo, Chris and his crew launched the Young Writers Program, which took in over 150 schools and 4000 kids. It was a huge success all around. Also, the NaNoWriMo podcast was created.

What surprises will this year bring? Only by signing up for this year's event will you know for sure. Are you up to the challenge? Think you can write a 175 page - 50,000-word novel in just one month's time? Then hurry over to NaNoWriMo's official site at http://www.nanowrimo.org and let's get going. There's only a short time left before 2006's big event gets underway! Hope to see you there!

Just the Facts Ma'am

Annual participant/winner totals:

1999: 21 participants and six winners

2000: 140 participants and 29 winners

2001: 5000 participants and more than 700 winners

2002: 13,500 participants and around 2100 winners

2003: 25,500 participants and about 3500 winners

2004: 42,000 participants and just shy of 6000 winners

2005: 59,000 participants and 9769 winners

We're estimating about 75,000 participants will head out into the noveling frontier on November 1, 2006.

Number of official NaNoWriMo chapters around the world: Over 250

Number of K-12 schools who participated in 2005: Over 100

Number of NaNoWriMo manuscripts that have been sold to big-time publishing houses: Nine Percent of NaNoWriMo's net proceeds from donations and merchandise sales that go to build libraries for children in Southeast Asia: 50%

Number of libraries NaNoWriMo has built through this program: Ten (three in Cambodia, seven in Laos)

Number of words officially logged by participants during the 2004 event: 428,164,975

Number of words officially logged by participants during the 2005 event: 714,227,354

(Facts are taken from NaNoWriMo's Media Page - http://www.nanowrimo.org/modules/cjaycontent/index.php?id=44)