The NaNo News

Young Voices Rewrite Contest!
Calling all young novelists in grades 6–12!

The Young Voices Foundation contacted us last week to let us know about this awesome contest! YA authors Dr. Sacra Nicholas, Nancy Hendrix, and Barbara Fite wrote Through a Looking Glass Darkly in 1990, and they need your help now in rewriting the book for the modern young adult.

Amazon's Novel Award!
Does anyone have an extra novel lying around?

Any chance you've already polished your 2008 NaNo effort? Great!

From now until February 8, you can submit your novel for the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. Learn more about the ABNA here and enter the contest!

Coming Soon: Script Frenzy 2009!
Join thousands of writers in penning a script this April!

Script Frenzy is the best! There are so many choices! You get to choose whether to write a screenplay, stage play, TV script, or comic book script and you get to choose whether to write with a partner or on your own.

How Did it Go?
Tell us what you thought about NaNo 2008 by filling out a survey!

If you wrote with us this November, we would love to hear how it went! You can do this by filling out a survey. Surveys help us make improvements to our website and to NaNoWriMo's YWP in general.

If you have 5 - 10 minutes to spare, we'd love to hear from you. Just click on one of the links below to get started!

Elementary School Student Survey

YWP Stats Just In!
96,301,496 words written by young writers alone!

Breakdown of NaNoWriMo's Young Writers Program 2008:

1. Total words written: 96,301,496
2. Number of writers participating online: 14,223
3. Average word-count goal: 21,417
4. Number of people who ever logged a word count: 6,940
5. Highest word-count goal set: 999,999.
6. Official NaNoWriMo 2008 winners: 1,985.

That means that we had a 14% win rate, which is the highest it's ever been for the YWP! Congratulations everyone!

Loving the number crunching,
Tavia

Over 1.5 Billion Words Written!
Now, thousands of Wrimos are asking themselves what's next.

Now that you've written a novel in a month, you may be wondering what else is possible. Either that, or you're wondering if it's healthy to sleep for over 24 hours straight. If you're like me, you may be somewhere in between feeling ecstatic and exhausted. One moment I'm stuffing my face with celebratory cookies, and the next I'm using my mouse pad as a pillow.

Congratulations!
You did it! You wrote like crazy for a whole month!

You wrote complicated plots about interesting characters! What you wrote was both brilliant and sometimes hilariously horrible. You wanted to give up, but you did not! You wrote and kept writing up until the very end.

No matter what your word count ended up being at midnight on November 30, you are a novelist!

You can do it!

Our winners have nearly doubled since yesterday. That is amazing! Congratulations to everyone who has reached their goals!

If you are still writing today: We all believe in you. You can do it!

Today is your day!

We’ll see you in the winner’s circle.

Jennifer

The final countdown is here!

You have today and tomorrow to reach your goal!

Hop over to the word war forum to get a great word count boost.

Or, try rolling 20s. Write for 20 minutes. Take a break for 20 minutes. Write for 20 minutes... and so on. You’ll be amazed at just how much you can write in 20 minutes.

You have come so far, novelist!

Jennifer here. I'll be standing in for Tavia this weekend.

As Tavia was heading out and I was stepping in for a few days, we talked about you. Yes, you! We talked about how far you've come. We are so proud of your progress! As of now, 653 people have found their way, word by word, to the winner's circle. Congratulations to each of you!

The rest of us sitting outside the winner's circle have three days left.