Hi! Me finish. Won with 53,000+ words. Tired.

Just a quick pop-in. I saw this and had to quote it for those still to write their chapters:

“Community Theater is the most effective way to cull the next generation of actors by making drama, as a profession, repellent to the talented.” - Thorax, 9 Chickweed Lane (Brooke McEldowney)

In the last week and still just under 18,000 words short. Don't worry, I'll make it! If I can just get my space gypsy out of bed with the two cat-men from planet Grissa long enough to prove none of her troup of entertainers - who travel via magic, not spaceships - murdered my friend flickguy, a.k.a. the Au Pair from Earth in "Blood and Kittens".

Then again, there's a high word count to them staying in bed.

100,000 lunatics spread throught 100 countries can't be wrong!

As in:
Q: "You're writing a 50,000 word novel in one month? Are you crazy?"
A: "Probably."

Pardon me while I brush the hair out of my eyes from high speed writing...

The voting day is a very good idea, in my opinion.

Opt in is even better.

Recommend makes a lot of sense and should do much to stop vicious acts of downgrading other writers' ratings. Or at least lessen their effect on rankings.

Personally, I'd love to see all three be part of the contests.

Gotta go, my word count is slipping.

Quick update for those interested - Cheeseliker is doing very well, especially for his first NaNo - 8,460 words, only slightly off-pace for 50,000 by the end of the month. I was fortunate enough to have a burst of creativity at the beginning, so I'm slightly ahead of the curve at close to 11,000. That's going to jump after tonight, because here in Austin we're having a 12-hour 'lock-down' (not actually locked down) and at last year's I wrote 8,000+ words. Penguin write-ins are the best!

Yeah, pettiness is very unattractive. I wonder if things would improve any with the 'opt-in' and 'recommend' options people have been suggesting? Seems like it might help, and it couldn't hurt.

Hey Cheese, I've been meaning to get back and see how you could possibly improve on your first draft. You did. Wow! This is really a fun read, and I feel like you have written the characters and the whole setting and plot in perfect harmony to everything that has come before. Did I mention how much fun this chapter is to read? By the way, you scare me a little, how many of the things you wrote sound directly out of the amateur theater group I work with. Of course, our john (sic) wrote about Myk Plummer, the plummer...

Oh, also, the writing is pretty darm seamless and nothing structure, spelling or grammatical even tried to throw me. Excellent job.

Congratulations!

UnknownEntity - I just came across this on the NaNo site and thought you might be interested. Two of this published authors books started out as NaNovels: www.geonncannon.com

And I would like to clean up my queue of stories.