62b

The Owl Gazette

Issue: 62 Page: 2

What's It All About?
by Eltanin Wemyss
Perhaps you have noticed several students with signatures on the Bulletin Board that have graphs and numbers in them, or the words "NaNo 2008 WINNER!" Perhaps you have heard your housemates talking gratuitously about NaNo. Perhaps you have seen the T.G.I.O. party on the BB. Perhaps you even read the article in the Owl Gazette describing NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writer's Month, but you didn't participate, because you don't know how it works, or what it means. I would like to take this opportunity to explain.

The way NaNo works is, you sign up on the website any time during the year. At midnight on November 1, you start writing, and you have until 11:59:59 P.M. on November 30 (as the website says) to write 50,000 words of a novel. It can be in any genre, on any topic, and you can do whatever you want with it. It can be for profit or for pleasure (a lot of NaNo novels have been published, and some people write fanfiction, mostly Harry Potter fanfiction); the only rule is that all 50,000 words MUST be written during November. There is a place where you can manually enter in your word count, but the only way to be an official, verified winner is to copy your manuscript and paste it into their Official Word Counter (most people "scramble" it first by replacing all the letters in their work with the letter A). If it's at least 50k, you win. It's as simple as that. There are no prizes, no awards, just the personal satisfaction of knowing that you did it, you actually wrote 50,000 words in thirty days. (Someone worked it out once and figured out that you have to write 1,667 words every day to make it. That makes it seem a lot more manageable than just saying 50k in thirty days!)

There are forums where you can ask for help if your plot gets stuck, ask questions about character development and plot realism (their example questions include "How many wallabies can you fit in a Tokyo subway car?"), play games to procrastinate, and just generally get support. There are "genre lounges" where everyone who is writing, say, Fantasy or Mystery or Mainstream Fiction can get together and talk about things that are specifically relevant to their type of work, and there are forums for different age groups and even for different writing groups. For the last two years, we've had a PAD's Hogwarts group on the forums, mainly so we can genuinely express our feelings without running afoul of the G rating on this website. We all duck in and chitchat about how our novels are going and what difficulties we're running into and how we got over rough patches. (Last year, Audrea Martin of Gryffindor gave us what I honestly think is the best writing advice ever: "When all else fails, go with this: AND THEN THE NINJAS DROPPED DOWN FROM THE CEILING!!!") This year was mostly Gryffindors and Ravenclaws, although every house had at least one person try for it.

I honestly don't think I would have made it even to 40k if it weren't for that support group. Gawyn Crossguard of Gryffindor, especially, kept encouraging everyone to keep writing. We shared excerpts from our novels with one another...people had "word wars" with one another, where they would race to see who could get the highest word count the fastest...and even when it got to be two days to go, and some people (like Hillary Stevens and Luna Lovegood and Arya Drottningu) had already become verified winners while others (like myself and Gred Weasley and Roxanne Whitez) were seven or eight or fifteen thousand words away, we all kept telling each other that we could do it. In the end, I think only a few students who joined from PAD's (and checked into the site) didn't actually pull through in the end. The two professors who joined up (Professor O'Connell and Professor Bliss) didn't end up completing it either, but...you know, we had fun, and that was what was important.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I felt like, really, while we were writing, it was like it wasn't such a big deal that we were in different houses. We never even really mentioned the Quidditch matches that were ongoing, except for me lamenting that the latest Slytherin match was going to start while I was sans Internet access AND trying to finish my novel. Yeah, we all introduced ourselves with "I'm so-and-so from such-and-such house", but after that it was just like, "Oh, yeah, Hilary is writing about vampires and Luna and Arya are beating the pants off of us and Gred has dropped off the face of the earth," not "There are ungodly amounts of Gryffindors here and the Ravenclaws are finishing ahead of us all and there are only three--well, two-and-a-half--Slytherins and one-and-a-half Hufflepuffs" (Riley Jake transferred in late November).

My challenge to all of you: Join the challenge, join the fun. Try NaNo next November. If nothing else, it is worth it to say, "Yes, I was there, I fought the good fight. I wrote something BETTER than the Great American/Canadian/British/Czechloslovakian Novel. I wrote a NaNo."

At First Glance
Lysander Sacks
When one first comes upon Hogwarts in a carriage, it can be very intimidating. The castle is, after all, quite large, and its reputation of grandeur precedes it. After entering the (quite well named) Entrance Hall with my mum and being sorted in PAD's office, I ignored the instruction to immediately go down to my new Common Room in the dungeons, choosing instead to do a little sight-seeing on my way down the grand staircase.

What I saw only intimidated me further. I'd never seen so many paintings and sculptures, much less fallen through so many stairs, in all of my life! What had been started as a quick look through the 6th floor corridor ended as a terrifying trip down a slide, landing rather painfully on my backside in front of a rather disorganized Bulletin Board in the aforementioned Entrance Hall.

Despite my overwhelming, albeit quick, first adventure at Hogwarts, I found the students of Hufflepuff to make it quite a bit easier. Within only a few hours, I had been introduced to several members of my house, been assigned a mentor, placed my things in my locker, and encouraged to write this article. I've never met as welcoming and polite a group as the 'Puffs who first greeted me.

I can't wait to get to know the rest of Hogwarts, and its students! (Although, hopefully, my next tour won't result in quite as much bruising.)

Do turn the page for more exciting news!