Katie Best
Opinion Editor
Tuesday, November 16
As I was browsing the NaNoWriMo website (nanowrimo.org), I discovered I was able to give donations to the website. There are different classification levels for donations, but all the proceeds go to three places: the NaNoWriMo website, publishing for certain winners and the Young Writers Program.
The Young Writers Program (YWP) is funded by NaNoWrimo and is dedicated to helping children become better writers and one day become published authors. This program has a plot generator (for those of us with writer’s block), information about the YWP, as well as information about April’s Script Frenzy competition and a collective word count (it’s currently at 111,756,394 words).
The collective word count keeps track of the amount of words written between everyone competing in NaNoWriMo’s YWP. While you do have to upload your finished word count by the end of the month, it is not required to keep all chapters uploaded consistently. I first started keeping count of the amount of words I had on an online writing site called fictionpress.com. I have the same pen-name on both NaNoWriMo and fictionpress, and on both sites you are able to find the amount of words written.
However, on fictionpress, you are able to continue your stories after the month of November is over and have fellow fictionpress writers provide feedback on your stories. On NaNoWrimo, you are only able to have writing buddies when signing up for an account. Once you are a writing buddy with another NaNo user, you are able to view their user profiles and current works.
Which ever site is chosen to keep track of the amount of words written, the story must be uploaded onto the NaNoWriMo website before the end of the month in order to be considered a winner (this means the 50,000 have been successfully completed).
14 days left until the end of NaNoWriMo.