Donation Day and what Nano means to me.

Well, it’s Donation Day over at National Novel Writing Month; in fact, it’s nearly over, but the donation fun has not been sold out. You still have a chance to win some of the hourly prizes, and the Office of Letters and Light is going to be releasing a special cover song in thanks for donations of over fifty thousand dollars today. And they still need more to cover the cost of putting on such a fabulous world-wide writing event!

I don’t have as much free money to donate around as I have in some previous years, and I’ve already donated two hundred to get into the Night of Writing Dangerously dinner, but I scraped up another twenty-five to join in the Donation Day fun. I didn’t win the hourly prize I had my eye on, but that’s alright.

In conjunction with Donation Day, Nanowrimo is asking people to tweet about ‘what Nano means to me’, and that got me thinking that what it means to me is probably too much to fit into 140 characters.

For one thing, it means all the friends, both at home and around the world, that I’ve met through Nano. I’ve always been shy in public situations, and I actually remember that the first time I went to a local Nano write-in, I sat at the next table and then left before the two MLs (chatting to each other) realized that I was a writer. But bit by bit Nano pulled me into the social side, and this year I’m the Co-ML, welcoming every wrimo to the write-ins and loving it!

On another level, Nanowrimo means something deep about the universal power of story-telling and how it draws us all together.

So best of luck to all you Nano-ers out there as we approach the half-way point in the month, and donate if you can! 🙂

V is for Video Diaries

The Script Frenzy A-Z challenge so far…

One of the highlights of Script Frenzies are the little video clips that the staff at the Office of Letters and Light film and post on the website, talking about their own struggles with their scripts, to encourage the rest of us and start conversations on the discussion board. Here are some of my favorite videos from this year…

Some ‘Young Writers Program’ Script Frenziers made their own trailer for the event, which is pretty cool!

Lindsay does a little demonstration of script formatting in action! The script equivalent for the video is here.

Summer Donation Day is tomorrow!

The Office of Letters and Light, which organizes National Novel Writing Month, Script Frenzy, and a few other programs, is doing a one-day donation drive tomorrow. The funds raised tomorrow will go towards the launch of the new ‘Camp Nanowrimo’ year-round writing extravaganza, and upgrades to the website hardware in anticipation of record-breaking traffic for the first few days of Nanowrimo in November 2011. And Lindsey Grant has been giving us a few sneak peaks via the ‘Breaking News’ space on the nanowrimo.org home page.

It looks like they’ve got some great limited edition donor thank-you gifts up for grabs, including bumper stickers and bear posters. I can tell you that I’ll definitely be pulling out the old credit card early tomorrow morning, because I don’t want to miss out on my goodies!

If you’re a Nanowrimo or Script Frenzy veteran, I encourage you to chip in whatever you can. And if not, then nobody’s asking you to donate, but watch this space for Camp Nanowrimo news, maybe take a look when it goes live.