Well it's all over, and there is an amazing number of winners! I'm a little saddened that I can't count myself amongst them but next year I hope I'll be back in the saddle to take part.

I particularly wanted to say a special thank you to all the people who have been doing the admin; I would not have had time this year to do everything and they have been amazing, often doing even more than I would have done and certainly doing it better!
 

It has been a very, very busy few weeks and I've sorely neglected this blog, but happily the group has been chundling along with lots of support from my fantastic admins I wanted to congratulate the people who are ALREADY FINISHED (I am in awe) and also the ones who are still on track, the ones who are miles off but determined and anyone who is in between categories. You're all doing amazingly.

I haven't heard from anyone yet about hosting their contest entries; in a few days or next week I will send out an email again about the contest to explain how it works and what to enter when the time comes. Keep writing, everyone!
 

It is technically now November here as it is 2.30am, but I haven't been to bed yet so I'm regarding it as Saturday still.

I wanted to make a quick post to say that I'm not taking part in NaNoWriMo this year, as the demands on my time are too numerous and I don't want to be struggling and feeling guilty about it. My first priority is my degree and then after that is this group, so a novel will not really fit.

Although I'm disappointed, at the same time I'm relieved because at the back of my mind had been a worry that I would flounder and focus too much on my NaNovel and let my university work suffer. Our terms are very short, I only have another five weeks of this one so I would miss a lot of work by shifting my priorities for the duration of the month.

Now it is time for bed, after a fairly disasterous Halloween with a friend getting stupidly drunk, throwing up in the taxi and costing me a fortune, and then taking about an hour to get into my room and into bed (and the assistance of another friend who is an angel sent from Heaven to come to my rescue twice today).
 

We're stacking up members at a phenomenal rate! I have been pondering the possibility of setting up a secondary account to hold the group's stuff, as there is a finite amount of space in my portfolio, but I think the cost would be prohibitive as I don't want to let my own upgrade lapse. I could probably clear out some of the stuff in my port that I haven't used or looked at in years (cNotes, I'm looking at you!).

Not much else to report right now.
 

Apologies that I forgot to send out the warm-up email on time; it's gone out now!

Not much to add except that we're still gaining new members; we're at 188 as I write this and I'm certain we'll reach 190 in a very short period of time. It's even possible we'll hit 200 before November! I'm not going to do any more publicising than usual, though, because my worry is that with so many members, we might lose some of the group spirit and also there may be more prize winners than we can afford. We'll cross that bridge if and when we come to it, though. If the worst comes to the worst (why am I writing so many cliches today?!) I can always buy some more gift points.

I haven't had any ideas about my own novel yet. In fact I don't think I have time to write one this year, as my play is in the middle of November and I have ice hockey matches every week for the next few weeks at least. I may start off and have a go just so that I don't miss out a year, but I'm not anticipating finishing this year when I have so much else that has to take priority

Having said that, it will be enough for me if we as a group manage to reach a combined word count of over two million. Even allowing for some people not making it to 50,000 and others not starting at all I think that's a realistic goal! If everyone wrote 25,000 we would be at 5 million. How amazing is that?
 

Just a very quick entry to say that I have removed the option of requesting help with hosting from the application form, because at least three quarters of people who were requesting it did so by mistake.

Anyone who has already requested hosting and has confirmed they genuinely need it, I will be emailing you shortly. Please remember that it is not necessary to host your entire novel in your portfolio: you only need to create a static item with the parts of the novel which you want to enter into the competition (for example opening paragraph or best page). I think I haven't made this very clear anywhere so when I have time I will be going back to it and making sure it is explained succinctly somewhere.
 

It's been a very exciting two days! As I mentioned in a group email we received a donation from The StoryMaster and today a WDC news email went around which included a link to this group, so we just had a surge of new members. Welcome to them!

I've decided it's about time to start sorting out rough values for prizes, so look out for another email later about that. It's always a bit hit and miss as I never know exactly how many people will hit the weekly word count goals so I have to budget on the assumption that lots of group members will reach all of them. Naturally the prizes can change at the last minute, although I try to make sure they can only get bigger! But at least I can start mapping out a rough idea of values.
 

It's been a while hasn't it, blog? I haven't been totally absent though, I've been sending out motivational emails and adding members and keeping on top of things but there hasn't been a moment to add a blog entry (there probably isn't really now, to be honest!).

What is new? Not really much; our funds are still down on last year but they aren't doing too badly and we now have 150 members! That's quite exciting.

Talking of members, I am deliberating making it a requirement, starting in 2010, to be able to host your novel in your portfolio. This is for several reasons: it is a lot easier than trying to arrange external hosting, and more importantly the majority of people who request this extrenal hosting never use it, either because they don't take part in NaNoWriMo after all or because they don't bother sending me their writing. So it doesn't seem to be worth all the effort. Any comments? I'll leave it in place this year because we have an unusually high number of people requiring hosting and it's possible that they will all use it (although many are inactive members from a few years ago).

Speaking of which, if you do not take part in NaNoWriMo for two years in a row and particularly if you are not active on Writing.com, I will probably remove you from the group so that we have a realistic idea of how many members are taking part. This makes it a lot easier to budget for prizes!

That's all for now, folks. Off to read 52 tort law cases and write a bunch of essays.
 

We've been collecting new members and my wonderful administrators are plugging away keeping things on track; everything seems to be in hand!

However, I'm aware that we need to do some serious fundraising if the prizes are going to be particularly exciting this year. I've been doing some sporadic reviewing and donating all the gift points I get from that straight into the group's kitty but we'll need more than that to really up the balance. It's not my strong point so I'm going to go and read some back issues of fundraising newsletters and see what ideas I can pick up.
 

Well I'm back from being on a canal boat (and being at work - I've worked 14 hours in the last two days which is ridiculous since I'm contracted to work 12 a week!) and I've trawled through the emails. We've had some new members and the username list looks great. So that's all good news!

Less great news, but not really too terrible, is that I still haven't sorted out access to the hosting pages for people who haven't got space for their novels. This is mostly because I can't remember my passwords, and ironically the password for the password page is wrong. So I'm waiting for my trusty father to sort that out for me (he's my technical go-to guy). Once I've got the password it'll be all systems go and I'm thinking that maybe this year I can make better use of that page.

And I just had an idea! I remember from last year that it was possible to get little NaNoWriMo word counters for this site; if that is happening again this year, then it would be really useful to have a page where everyone's counter is linked and then there would be no need to go off-site to check where everyone is up to. I'll look into it and report back!