From the November 20^th 2006 issue of The Link

Literary Arts

Pirates are so two weeks ago

A NaNoWriMo journal, no longer in piratical form

By Tim Case

Last week, I conceded that I was not, in fact, a pirate, but a mere human, struggling to come up with a story that could span 50,000 words and still make an iota of sense. This week, with my deadline fast approaching, I decided to take a look at other people participating in this zany marathon of key pounding.

I was shocked at how many people are actually taking part: nearly 80,000. I knew this was a fairly popular event, as far as writing events go, anyway, but that number was much higher than I anticipated. Of course, in order to be included in that number, one only has to sign up—but not necessarily write anything. Hmm, typing that sentence makes me feel a sudden need to loosen my collar. My own word count, as I type this, is a paltry 4,438.

I decided that in order to parse any useful information from Nanowrimo.org, I needed to narrow my focus. Luckily, the site allows you to search through all the participating authors with a fair amount of detail. You can search by keywords in username, genre, region and a few other criteria. I searched for authors from Montreal and was presented with 201 results.

Among the titles that caught my eye were Crisse, des Zombies! (somewhat suspiciously passing 50,000 words by Nov. 9), Best Man for Murder (at 30,490 as I type this) and The Secret Adventures of Georgia O. (0 words uploaded as I type this, but a title that caught my eye nonetheless).

There are several cool features of the NaNoWriMo website, not the least of which is a little Flash thingy that looks like an honest-to-god bound and printed book. It includes—if the author so desires—a portrait, NaNoWriMo stats and an excerpt from the work. You also actually have to “turn” each page, accomplished by clicking the corner of the page you’re on and dragging it across the screen, as an animation of a page turning unfolds in front of you. Sure it’s a gimmick, but it’s still kind of neat—unless you actually want to read the excerpts, in which case it’s kind of annoying.

On the inside of every participant’s “book” is the current rank in terms of word count of their associated region, or of their genre if you click on “sort by genre.” Montreal’s score? Sixty-first, with almost 2 million words. Not bad at all, considering the sum total of the competition so far is around 515,000,000 words. Seattle, England (city not specified) and Los Angeles take the top three spots. By genre, the most popular are Fantasy, Other Genres, Literary Fiction (as opposed to what, I don’t know) and Sci-Fi.

All of these nifty numbers are really secondary to the purpose of the competition, though, which is to get people on their asses and start writing. Luckily, the website provides plenty of resources to help accomplish this, too. The forums, which are broken down into a wide range of subsets, are probably the most useful in this regard.

There are forums for each participating region, and more general forums to help you workshop, get writing prompts or just shoot the shit with other masochistic wordsmiths like yourself. Although I’ve spent little time on these forums so far, they do seem like an interesting—though perhaps dangerous—place. Topics range from the mild and unassuming, “All-Ages Coffee House: A safe corner to talk about life during NaNoWriMo,” to “So, are you putting a psychic ferret in your novel?”

Many regions also have regular real-life meetings, where authors can mingle and get ideas to help them win the competition’s coveted—and electronically generated—winner’s certificate. It’s a prize reserved only for those who actually hit the 50,000 word limit, and it’s one I plan to procure.