How's NaNoWriMo coming along? Good? Not so good? Really, I can't believe anyone would actually want to quit after three weeks of hard work! Please don't do that to yourself; that'd be pretty harsh. :-) Actually, I got a pretty harsh surprise today - my recently bought domain name for The Evening Hoot appeared on Google! Without my consent of course...

Seriously, that is not cool. :D I never meant for it to go on Google! That message in the snapshot above was just put for fun, for those sneaky visitors trying to get a glimpse of the new layout before it's published - which trust me, I would never put up to public visitors before the launch date anyways. So I just wrote a little message for all those folks, and suddenly, surprise - it's on Google!

Oh well. At least I didn't include the word "ga'hoole" in it, so that I don't get embarrased much more. And few people access this website through googling "the evening hoot" - though there is one persistent person in my stats who refuses to bookmark this website and does it the hard way... You know who you are! :-)

At least I can finally see how my domain name looks in Google - and you know what? I'm not in the least regretful that I chose www.theeveninghoot.com rather than www.eveninghoot.com. Three letters, not much of a big difference - and not that annoying either, to those who would've prefered the shorter name. Plus, all of you were right when I was still choosing and you guys said it'd be better to stick with the original name. What's a title without proper grammar? :-) Yeah, I know, only Bookie would make such a lame joke!

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First things first - Warriors 20 Questions. If you haven't yet, be sure to vote, since it closes Sunday and we desperately want to reach more than 400 participants before then. No idea what W20Q is? Then find out by taking it, or by reading the boring explanations!

Back to business - I finally return to the land of NaNoWriMo! With close to twenty-three thousands words as well! I know many of you thought I had abandoned my novel - just like some of you thought I had abandoned The Evening Hoot this past summer - but that is not the case. Even with all the distractions, spamming incidents, shoutbox problems, fights, arguments, e-wars, etc. I managed to come close enough to being done half of 50k words.

What do you think I was doing this whole week, hardly updating this blog? To continue writing my novel of course! Why do you think I hardly signed into nanowrimo.org to update my word count? Because I was still writing! It's true, the spamming incident did take a big chunk out of last week - especially since I was also trying to keep up and update this blog daily. But I caught up this week; still behind a little bit, but at a good pace.

I've actually realized though how close I feel to this blog now. Those of you who visited The Evening Hoot since its beginning might remember that there was an attempt before this for me to start a blog - it failed miserably. But this new attempt at blogging not about Ga'Hoole but about NaNoWriMo made a wonderful success, don't you think?

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The days slip by and before you know it, it's November 4th already! Actually, after launching this new fresh layout, I was surprised that it was only November 4th, since I managed to write so much on this blog, it seemed like a week had already passed! Nevertheless, this is better for me, since I have some NaNoWriMo catching up to do! The more days, the better!

And yes, The Evening Hoot just got a fresh new layout, unless you haven't noticed on your way coming here! :D No, this is not the new layout I was promising everybody once we launch The Evening Hoot on our new domain name, www.theeveninghoot.com. That will come later - patience my friend! This layout is just for fun, just for a fresher look!

Okay, I'll explain more clearly - even though we're getting a new layout in about a month anyways, I felt that I should take advantage of the Freewebs easy editing, since I didn't switch to HTML. We will be using HTML and CSS once the site gets hosted on our .com domain name, but for now, when I need to concentrate on simply writing and pressing submit, working with Freeweb's easy designer editor is much... well, easier! :-)

Therefore, I could change the layout any time I want, in a matter of mere seconds, choosing out of many good pre-made templates. We've had our last one for ages now - since the very beginning in fact. The idea of a fresh new layout seemed exciting to me. Especially now that the website has been getting far more visitors than before (due to this new blog), I felt welcoming them with the old layout was not very enticing.

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Obama became the new president of the United States. And at the same time, Firestar won the Ultimate Leader Election at www.warriorcats.com, a Warriors election all by itself to choose the best leader to rule the forest. After four rounds, the election has ended, and all those pesky Warriors fans who only read the first original series, obviously voted for "their hero" Firestar. And you know what? This sucks.

Which is naturally why I made a comic about it! :D To cheer up a bit while the perfect Firestar takes his place as the leader of the whole forest. As though he doesn't already act like it in the books! Did we really need to have an election only to have Firestar win? Vicky promised the fans to write a short unique story about the leader that wins, and frankly, I've heard enough of Firestar's perfectness for a lifetime. If this is another one of those "Tigerstar was a villain, but still a great warrior", then spare me.

But yes, I did draw that comic for those of you wondering. :-) Took me two hours and the expensive but incredible program called Illustrator - no pixely blurry pixels, only smooth vectors there! Besides that, I've been busy installing a new feature for The Evening Hoot - the shoutbox, where you can chat live with your friends, for those of you frustrated by the slow means of communication through the guestbook or discussion.

Unfortunately, someone wanted to ruin this enjoyment. Badly. And not only that - the guestbook and discussion suffered a considerable amount of spam as well. You can take a look right now, since I haven't deleted the messages yet. This is so that I have proof when sending the Freewebs team an "abuse ticket" and when I announce the culprit. For I have the name, yes indeed.

If you came here today expecting a pleasant time at The Evening Hoot only to find stupid red letters of spam barging into your way, with the IP address somehow cleverly removed from the guestbook as well, then I have to apologize, even though this is not entirely my fault.

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The days slip by and before you know it, it's November 4th already! Actually, after launching this new fresh layout, I was surprised that it was only November 4th, since I managed to write so much on this blog, it seemed like a week had already passed! Nevertheless, this is better for me, since I have some NaNoWriMo catching up to do! The more days, the better!

And yes, The Evening Hoot just got a fresh new layout, unless you haven't noticed on your way coming here! :D No, this is not the new layout I was promising everybody once we launch The Evening Hoot on our new domain name, www.theeveninghoot.com. That will come later - patience my friend! This layout is just for fun, just for a fresher look!

Okay, I'll explain more clearly - even though we're getting a new layout in about a month anyways, I felt that I should take advantage of the Freewebs easy editing, since I didn't switch to HTML. We will be using HTML and CSS once the site gets hosted on our .com domain name, but for now, when I need to concentrate on simply writing and pressing submit, working with Freeweb's easy designer editor is much... well, easier! :-)

Therefore, I could change the layout any time I want, in a matter of mere seconds, choosing out of many good pre-made templates. We've had our last one for ages now - since the very beginning in fact. The idea of a fresh new layout seemed exciting to me. Especially now that the website has been getting far more visitors than before (due to this new blog), I felt welcoming them with the old layout was not very enticing.

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Gasp! The personal blob is gone! Replaced by an ugly cat! What do we do, what do we do? Firstly, let's all calm down. My blob just took a short vacation, as for the cat, she's not all that ugly! :D Okay, sorry, I know this has nothing to do with NaNoWriMo, but after finding this important news, even if it does concern Warriors and not Ga'Hoole, I thought I'd share it with all of you.

Thanks to Don Hudson, artist of the newest Warriors manga trilogy, Tigerstar and Sasha, who tipped me off about the first 21 pages of Escape From the Forest, available to read online for free, courtesy of Tokyopop themselves! Escape From the Forest is the second manga book of the trilogy and is set to be released December 23, 2008. The cover has already been released and can be viewed her.

So, for those of you who are interested, or for those of you readers who were left frustrated by the cliffhanger of the first book, you will not be disappointed! To read the pages, visit the official Tokyopop website, and in the middle of the page you'll find a snazzy Flash widget. Be sure to select Escape From the Forest from the sidebar scrolly thingy, and make the video full-screen, so you can actually read it! :D

However, I know that many Warriors fans would prefer to have the pages distributed in an image format, whether its for easier online reading or for their graphics. Not to worry - though Tokyopop does not include a link to download the video or pages seperately, I have myself captured the first seven pages of the book in a high-resolution and clear PNG format, ready for you to use!

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Well, I never thought my blob picture would turn to the one above, especially not in the beginning, but unfortunately, it has. :( What seemed to be a challenging but fun writing marathon before, has thrown in my face a Failed Miserably  message. How else could you describe 764 words?

That's uh... bad. Definitely not a good start. On the first day of NaNoWriMo too, when I should've been typing away like my friend Ripplepelt (more about her later), who -drum roll please- got some 5000 words accomplished yesterday!! :o I only wish the same could be said for me.

Have you heard of the NaNoWriMo report card? It's a handy free Excel sheet that you can download for NaNoWriMo - you enter the number of words you wrote in that day, the number of hours you spent, and a few other details such as your morale from 1-10; and it gives you a detailed analysis and average compared to your other days.

Of course, there can be no real averages or comparisons just yet, since there's only one day analized, but still, interesting to hear what it says. In my case - and mine is a bad case of 764 words - I have 49236 words left and 1.5% complete. Not  too good. At this rate, it says, I have about 64 hours left of writing and will be finished by January 5, 2009. Which of course, is not what I'm working towards. Wanna see a snapshot?

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It's here, it's here, it's here!! :D Are you dancing in excitement or jumping from toe to toe and being a nervous wreck? Frankly, I think my personal blob there is doing both. And so am I. Did I plan my novel enough? Will I actually be able to write 1667 words today? Should I visit NaNoWriMo.org and update my word count every five minutes? What to do, what to do, what to do?!

Well, first things first - to get a good night's sleep. I don't know about you, but I'm not the type of person to stay up till midnight to write my first word. Especially that according to the NaNoWriMo blog they had two server outages, and my computer would probably be part of one of them. Not a lot of fun having the "Error" message repeated again and again, eh?

So, I simply woke up early in the morning after sleeping well; yawned, stretched, drank some tea, ate three candies from my Halloween bag, and... finally got to start writing this blog post! :D Fortunately, my web stats for today showed that no one had yet visited The Evening Hoot today. Fortunately, because I wanted to post this blog post before any one else woke up early - but I do hope the number grows higher throughout the day!

In fact, this might be the most traffic my blog might get - today, because I mean, it's the start of NaNoWriMo and that's pretty important! :D And talking about numbers and the most traffic, they say that this should also be the easiest day to get your 1667 words, and that seeing as you've been (hopefully) planning your novel for weeks, in your head or on paper, it's just struggling to get out and would probably make your fingers type much more than 1667 words. At least today.

So is this true? It really depends. There's a true side of it I think, for every person, even if you haven't planned your story - on the other hand though, some people prefer more planning and others have no idea at all what they're writing about. So no, I wouldn't say this is necessarily the easiest day to write - it might be - but more of "the most easy-going" one, the "happiest" one.

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Happy Halloween! :D But aside from trick-or-treating and hanging out with friends, did you prepare yourself for tomorrow, when NaNoWriMo actually begins?

I don't know about you, but seeing as this is my first year in NaNoWriMo and I don't want to fail miserably but actually manage to write my 1667 daily words - and with inspiration and enthusiasm too - I've done a few preparations. I'll list mine and then I thought it'd be interesting to hear what you might've done, by posting in the comments.

1) I emptied my inbox, by archiving (Gmail button...) all of my useless emails that clutter my email, so that if there is an important one, I can always see it quickly and won't get distracted. It was also high time I removed all those annoying emails that I already read - and satisfying to see a fresh, clean inbox!

2) I put a Vacation Message on my email, saying that I'm going on a NaNoWriMo Quest and that I won't come back the same! :D Which is probably true, you know! Again, less distraction, motivates me to check my email less, knowing that its replying for me, even though automatically. Don't email me though just to see the message - it's nothing special!

3) Cleaned my desk. Actually, I still have that to do, but I'm planning it, and since I still have some time today before trick-or-treating, I'm sure it'll be entirely possible for me to find the time to do that. My desk is cluttered and if I don't clean it up now, I'll want to do it later on, and therefore procrastinate on my NaNoWriMo by making up excuses.

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Prize, pride, or personal? In other words, for those of you who have set out to do NaNoWriMo this year, you have to have a reason. Otherwise, you'll have no motivation to write your novel whatsoever! For most of you, it can be simply reaching the challenging feat of 50 000 words in one month - that would be pride, for of course, reaching that goal should make you proud! It can be for personal reasons, maybe to improve your writing skills or spill that novel that you've always had in your head onto paper and ink. Or, it can be for the prize.

Prize, you ask? What prize? Well, technically speaking, there is no prize, at least not until this year. You're supposed to do NaNoWriMo for yourself, for the fun of it, for the enjoyment of writing a novel in thirty days - the reasons are endless! To actively participate in one of our era's most enchanting art forms. To write without having to obsess over quality. To be able to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on, taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work! :D

What's more, it would seem impossible to give every one of those 15 000 dedicated people who crossed the 50k line last year a worthy prize. But actually, it's now coming true. Having gone to the NaNoWriMo official boards as well as some other forums where the lovely administrators agreed to create a NaNoWriMo sub-board or two, I found out that those who participated last year and "won", recently received an email.

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