How to validate as a NaNoWriMo winner

1. Log into the NaNoWriMo site.
2. Go to Edit Novel Info under My NaNoWriMo.
3. Under the Word Count box, click I am ready to validate my novel.
4. Paste your novel in the pop-up window and submit to verify.

Don’t see that validate link? Double check your time zone under Author Info even if you are completely sure it was correct the last time you looked. It can sometimes get reset and that is the issue 99% of the time when you don’t see the link.

Any additional questions? Leave them below and I’ll do the best to answer.

To your right, you’ll see one of the newly launched for 2011 NaNoWriMo widgets. All of the widgets update automatically but this particular widget works in the following way:

My Month is a simple display showing overall progress and how you did on any given day. Light green and red show where you were above or below the goal for the day, bold green and red are reserved for days where you did exceptionally well or monumentally badly.

I don’t know if I believe this description. I have never seen either light green or light red which means that I either am exceptionally awesome or monumentally bad all the time which seems like a stretch. Also, what is yellow? Are we calling yellow “light green?” Because I have to call BS on that if that is the case.

Regardless, this is a picture of how my NaNoWriMo has gone so far this year.

I do freely own those red days when I wrote nothing all day. BUT you will notice that there are far less red days then in previous years because I have been very good about trying to write at least a little every day. Oh and Monday the 7th should be a green, not a yellow. I was in an online write-in and hit the daily word goal but just forgot to update it on the site before midnight. My bad.

The goal this year is less red days, though I know red days will happen since we’re out of town a lot this month. Even if I manage to write on the road, I probably won’t have internet to update word count. But I really want to get better this year about writing every single day.

I owe you a more in-depth post about how the actual story itself is going but I know some of you like to keep an eye on my progress to keep me in check so I thought I’d share this with you.

What does your month look like when it comes to your writing goals?

So, for posterity, we had a freakish out of season snowstorm on October 29th. Because there were still leaves on the trees, the snow pulled down many, many branches and whole trees. If you aren’t in the area, it’s really hard to explain just how massive the damage was and how, over a week later, it’s still not even really cleaned up. It’s like, it’s just snow, what’s the big deal, right? Many areas look like a tornado ripped through. Trees are snapped in half, big branches down everywhere, whole trees have fallen into the road and… just left there. Driving in some areas is… interesting.

But many trees down meant many power lines down. We lost power between 3 and 4 PM on Saturday, October 29th. We didn’t get it back until the evening of November 3rd. Our neighborhood of 400 homes was completely dark for 5 days. It was very freaky looking. (What deity has it out for Denville, man? Our poor downtown was completely trashed by the Hurricane Irene flood and this time we were the top town in NJ with number of houses without power.) Continue Reading »