NaNoWriMo Breaking News
October 1, 2003

Dear Novelists-to-be,

Welcome to the fifth year of National Novel Writing Month! New sign ups are enabled, and seem to be working great. And the forums have been opened! Let the joyous procrastinating begin!

Some of you reported not being able to log into accounts in the last hour. We've isolated the goblin responsible and had him relocated to someone else's website. As we shake the dust out of last year's site, we will no doubt discover a few more pesky creatures that will temporarily disable log-ins and cause other mischief. If you ever have account troubles, give it a couple hours and try again. All should be well.

For our participant icon this year (posted there on the lower left) we asked artist Claire Robertson to imagine life as it might have been all the way back in 1999, when NaNoWriMo began. From archaeological records, we understand the late '90s to have been a period of swashbuckling derring-do, where pirates battled bloodthirsty aquatic woolly mammoths for control of the profitable oceanic trade routes. Also, laptop batteries apparently only lasted two measly hours. The mind reels...

Anyway, it's really, really exciting to be embarking on the NaNo journey once again. We're staffed this year by a host of heroes, including:

Julia: Brave grant-writer, answerer of emails, and overseer of the NaNo electronic t-shirt bazaar. Julia lives in Chicago and is writing her first NaNo novel this year.

Lauren: Veteran Wrimo and Municipal Liaison who is handling all matters Municipal Liaisony.

Russ and Ashley: Our ferociously competent tech team who have ably stepped in to the enormous shoes left by Dan, NaNo's tech saint.

Speaking of tech stuff, all 2002 participants were sent an email last Wednesday with a link to reactivate the 2002 account. If you didn't get it, check your bulk/junk mail folder. I know Yahoo neatly batted all of our emails into users' bulk-mail dungeon. If you can't find the reactivation email there, and don't want to just create a new account, send an email with your NaNo username to info@nanowrimo.org, and we'll take care of it.

If you can't remember your NaNo username from last year, go to the Authors & Novels page, and do a search under your city. Voila!

Finally, the 2003 t-shirts are available for sale on our t-shirt page. All proceeds from the shirts go directly to the organization, so please buy dozens.

And with that, I raise a toast to another year of frantic noveling. See you in the forums!

Chris
NaNoWriMo