October Novel Prep Challenge

Okay to save some time and because that info on the website doesn't give you a clear picture of what day one or even day 7 is like... I present to you what I have learned over the last 11 years.

No, you don't put your novel on their site. You will however at some point be able to copy it into their validator to validate your word count. It is not currently available but once November 1st rolls around there will be a place... usually by your name where you can put your current word count via your writing program. You just type it in and hit submit.

Then usually a week sometimes halfway into the second week they will activate the validator. They wait that long because it has in past years when they tried to activate it from the start crashed the whole website. This will of course inevitably crash the website.

Expect it to crash. It will crash. Follow them on Twitter if you have an account. They will let you know when its back up. Even without the validator we pretty much over load it those first couple of weeks. Then people begin to quit or get so into their novel they don't sign in until closer to the end. Once everyone starts trying to validate at the end of the month it can crash then too but it usually doesn't, at least not more than once or twice. LOL

The validator does not keep your info. You can scramble the words if your afraid of a hacker stealing your work through the validator but it doesn't happen because as soon as it calculates your word count the info is gone from the website so you must either post it here or save it on your hard drive.

Note: Once every few days... Back it up. I mean if your not posting it here, email the file to yourself. I have lost nearly my entire novel at different times because I forgot to do this. Do not forget to do this. Closer to the end of Nano I get paranoid and start doing it every day. I hate losing words because the file got corrupted or the power went out or... Well you get the idea. Remember Murphy's law here. If it can go wrong it will. So do everything you can to put a sock in Murphy's mouth and tie his hands behind his back.

So what you can expect on the 1st is chaos. I have found its best to avoid the site all together the first few days and focus on your writing. If you need word crawls, there is a wiki that lists many. Or make copies of them for your own use before the 1st really hits. Its already started in New Zealand so you need to hurry. It doesn't get bad though until they add the US. Then all heck breaks loose. I'm off to make a copy of the OA crawl for use on the 1st.