I’m giving this serious consideration. I’ve never tried it before.
One plot I’m thinking about is one I got from the “adopt a plot” link, about a three person team of demon hunters, that includes a Wiccan and a (Christian)priest. Potential for some interesting dialogue there.
Because clearly I’m insane, I’m in. Same topic as last year.
If you’ll excuse me, I need to go find a straitjacket and gibber a lot. 
I might keep an unofficial count. I was rather productive last year (compared to the other months), so we’ll see.
I can’t believe you guys have made me interested again! Curse you. I just renewed my id from last year. I guess I’ll give it a go, even though I doubt I’ll finish. Last year I got to 20,000 and ran out of steam. I can’t stop myself from trying to write something that is halfway decent. Now I need to think of a decent idea that excites me enough to write for a full month and yet I’m not too attached to, so I won’t be compelled to make it good.
It was a great experience doing it last year, but I’m just not interested this time around. Maybe next year.
I’m in, and this will be my first go. Eep.
I’m in, although I have no plot, no story, and very little confidence that I can finally win this thing.
I would love to participate, but I’m facing a minor problem. I will be spending a week back in my old stomping grounds of Portland, Oregon for Thanksgiving, and I just don’t see being able to devote any time to writing. If anyone has any suggestions, I’m certainly willing to listen.
It may help that I will be staying at my brother and sister-in-law’s house, and they do have a computer with a broadband Internet connection. I could imagine getting up extra early in the morning (easy to do given the time zone change) and getting some writing done, and then e-mailing the results back home.
You might find Writely useful. It’s a word processor on the web so that you can use any internet-connected computer to log into your document and write/edit it. It also supports multiple users, so if you happen to be a hive mind…
Used to be you needed invited to use it, so if anyone is interested and it still requires invites, I’d be happy to send them.
Not much. Competiting was one huge accomplishment; convincing myself that I should edit & try to publish is an accmplishment I’ve yet to achieve.
The first one, I formatted, printed, and bound. It’s on my shelf. No one else will ever read it. Ever.
I really do plan to edit the second one someday - and then print & bind it.
Last year lulu.com offered all nano-ers one copy of their Nano, providing they got it finished and edited and ready to submit by…some date. Maybe 12/31.
I couldn’t do it by the deadline last year, but I’m determined to make it this year. Heck, even if they don’t offer it as a freebie, it’d be worth it to have the book on my shelf. 
I’m in. I thought about trying it last year, but chickened out. This time, the crazy vibe is stronger, and I have succumbed. I’ve never tried anything like this before, and am a little overwhelmed, but I’ve got the germ of a plot, I’ve downloaded a bunch of outlining methods, bought myself some index cards, and created me an account at NaNoWriMo. Now I just have to get ready to write. One thing I didn’t see anywhere in the FAQ – do they check somehow to make sure you didn’t create your document before 11/1? Because I could see myself using some document that I started outlining in pre-November to begin the writing in and don’t want to get DQ’d for something stupid like that.
chews fingers anxiously
Relax! NANOWRIMO runs basically on the honor system. After all, the only ‘prize’ is whatever satisfaction you derive from reaching your goal, so the only person hurt if you decide to cheat in some manner is yourself.
The only ‘checking’ done is that you upload a text file of your NaNo to a word counter before midnight 11/31/06. If you have 50,000 words or more it gives you access to a ‘certificate’ you can download and print. If you come up a little short, you can write some more and resub, as many times as you like.
There’s no other check that the text file is a genuine novel or anything like that. It just counts how many “letter-cluster - space” units you have. You could write a single sentence and just copy it into a file a few thousand times. You could cut and paste a huge chunk from an online article. You could count from one to 50,000. You could type random letters for hours and hours. It will still pass the word counter.
In fact, they tell you to go ahead and greek your upload if you’re at all nervous about turning lose of what may be the Next Best Seller: just do a bunch of search-and-replaces ON A COPY of your file, like turning all the vowels into U’s and four or five common consonants into Zs or anything like that.
The word counter doesn’t care.
What StarvingButStrong said. You’re free to outline, plan, do all that sort of stuff; however, what you’re not supposed to do is start writing ahead of time. So, you can plan your scenes with as much detail as you like, but you can’t start pre-writing a scene because it’ll be difficult, let’s say. I think the honor system is important here.
I’ll use my novel from last year as an example: some time after the 2004 NaNo, I started writing another story, because the NaNo was so much fun. I liked the characters and the same basic idea; however, it turned into a train wreck. I thought that I’d like to scrap what I had written and start fresh for NaNo. I checked in the rules forum and got the okay. So I deleted the previous version and started over. Were some sentences repeats of the first version? Possibly, but it would have been accidental.
If you’re starting a new story, you’re free to prepare all you want. If you make an honest mistake and put a small bit verbatim into the NaNo, will it be a big deal? I can’t imagine it would be.
So, have fun! 
Boy, this is one tough contest!
Today I went out and bought me a new ergonomic keyboard with more bells and whistles than a bell-and-whistle factory, a wireless optical mouse, and an ergonomic mouse pad. I may go so far as to buy a new computer desk just so I know I’ll have someplace comfortable to use these things.
And then I spent most of the morning and all the afternoon working on my character outlines because there’s not enough to do in my job to fill a day. Woohoo.
Just a reminder to everyone who does NoNoWriMo: if you want to see your book in print afterward, you *don’t *want to go through PublishAmerica. You can check the Beware & Background Check forum of the Absolute Write forums for the most thorough source of information for this vanity press, or you can just do a Google search for “PublishAmerica complaints.” (no quotes)
I’m in. In you’re in or near Stockton, my big goal is to have at least two successful write-ins. I’m also thinking of doing IM write-ins or chats. (Yes, I’ve never finished yet and need to learn to do that, but I need to learn to deal with people more.)
Has anyone checked out the dare thread? 29 pages long last night, and growing. Good source of ideas. Most aren’t plots, just bits of business. But interesting.
Where is that?