I just received this email from the staff at NaNoWriMo. If you have been holding off to join us on this fun adventure, then this is the last year to get in on it.
Hi everyone,
For twelve years, the Night of Writing Dangerously has been an important fundraiser for NaNoWriMo, but equally importantly, it has been an opportunity to connect in person with the writers for whom NaNoWriMo has been a guiding light and a shining star. The community-building aspects of the event were always as important to us, if not more so, than the fundraising side.
But over the course of the last five years, the fundraising side of it has become increasingly challenging. The total amount raised by the Night of Writing Dangerously has been steadily decreasing, while costs to put on the event have risen sharply. The number of people able to attend the event has also decreased, as our necessary price increases have put ticket prices out of reach for more and more people. Costs are slated to increase again this year, and we’ve had to sit down and wrestle with the realities of being a small non-profit organization.
And as a result, we have made the difficult decision that 2018 will be the last Night of Writing Dangerously.
We know many of you will be incredibly disappointed to hear this news. We are disappointed as well; we love this event, and have worked hard to try to find ways to make the math work. We hope that in the future, we’ll be able to plan a new in-person event that will be accessible to more participants, with all the joy and inspiration of the Night of Writing Dangerously.
Let’s send the Night of Writing Dangerously off on a high note
And in the meantime, we hope you’ll join us to send off the Night of Writing Dangerously with our biggest, best event ever. We’ll be pulling out all the stops to make our final Write-a-thon one to remember, and we’d love to see you there. We know that not all of you will be able to join us this year and were already planning to attend in future years, and we’re sorry that won’t be happening. We’ll keep in touch as plans for future events develop, and we hope to see you at a NaNoWriMo event down the road.
But if you can attend this year, we recommend getting your fundraising up and running or buying your ticket as soon as you’re able to, as we suspect there’s going to be a full house this year.
The Night of Writing Dangerously has been an incredible event for our organization and for the writers who have attended it. We will miss it greatly, and we will remember it fondly. We are so grateful to you for the support you’ve given our organization over the years, and we hope this decision won’t dim your memory of past events or dampen your enthusiasm for future NaNoWriMo events. The future is bright, friends, we just have to give it some time to reveal itself.
Sarah Mackey
Director of Community Engagement
Chelsea Haller 