The NaNoWriMo site relaunches on October first. That’s nine days from now. Naturally, I’m excited; after all, the relaunch means shiny new forums, a blank novel info page for me to pen my novel info on (once I come up with it, of course), a blank word count bar, new merchandise in the store, new donor goodies, and of course, new Wrimos!
But for all the excitement that’s in me right now, there’s also a little bit of panic. Not panic over a lack of plot, mind you; after all, I came up with the plot for my three-day novel less than five minutes before starting to write it and still finished it in well less than 72 hours. No, I’m talking about wiki panic. See, when the site relaunches, the 2009 forums are gone, and the site archives from past years may also disappear because of the load the new forums will cause on the site’s server. The site did quite well last year when compared to previous years, so I hope this trend continues. But when the site relaunches, other Wikiwrimo contributors and I won’t have access to those archives for an undetermined period of time. I don’t remember when they went up last year, but it was probably late in the season, if after November altogether, and the 2008 archive never went up. Those things take time, after all. The 2002 and 2004 archive still isn’t up, and the 2004 archive was lost and will never go up. This one makes the archivist in me cry because apparently the robots.txt file blocked bots from accessing the forum, and now the Wayback Machine has no copies of the 2004 forum. At all. I can access parts the 2002 forum with the Wayback Machine if I have an afternoon to kill, but I have to resort to guessing for anything from 2004.
So with nine days to go, I’m trying to think of anything and everything that happened in the past eleven NaNos that should be in Wikiwrimo that I may not be able to access after the site relaunch. This should make me panic, and it is making me panic a little. It’s not the kind of panic that sends me into blind panic, making me think of it over everything else. It’s one of those panics that makes me very aware of a deadline that I have absolutely no control over. I keep telling myself that as long as I have the biggest articles on the site done, everything else will fall into place by the first when the site launches and more people will be visiting (both that site and this one). Priorities, self.
The bad thing about this? I’ll be at a family gathering on the evening of October first at the house of a family member who does not have Internet access. Fate, why must you do this to me?