Let 100,000 WriMos Bloom

This year there seems to be a grassroots flavor to NaNoWriMo. Browsing around, YT found the usual spate of newspaper articles on the contest, but the top Google hits were from smaller newspapers. The Worcester Telegram ran a nice article, which will no doubt disappear into paid archives a week or two after this blog entry is written. No matter: here's the key piece of information.




NaNoWriMo is growing by about 20,000 writers per year, pretty impressive, and the novel completion rate is hanging in at just under 20%. Of course, the chances of getting a NaNo novel published are still tiny.

But this year feels different. The NaNo official web site has been slow, slow, slow this year. ML Tiffany is taking a more laissez-faire attitude, so there's a lot of buzz about setting up meetings here, there and everywhere around Detroit. Last night at Z's we got six writers in total. Today in Royal Oak and tomorrow night in Waterford, YT would not be surprised if the numbers are similar. What's different is there might be some informal gathering going every day of the week.

So the atmosphere is one of creative ferment.