The National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) marathon has yielded 676,900,348 words in nine days as writers around the country struggle to compose a 50,000-word novel draft in a single month.

If you need some inspiration, check out our NaNoWriMo toolkit or find a NaNoWriMo homebase. Twitter is crowded with NaNoWriMo scribes, and the tweets come pouring in every minute. Here are a few choice tweets from harried writers as they toil under a massive deadline:

BarelyKnit: "It might be that I'm just not a novelist. Maybe I'm more of an...essayist. Or maybe a rodeo clown."

shawnaatteberry: "Next year: going to do grocery shopping for the month before #NaNoWriMo starts."

lauriek: "mechanic son of Italian immigrant parents just became Jewish son of a lawyer and a psychiatrist. he's still a delinquent, though."

Pre-orders for the Nook, Barnes & Noble's (BKS) digital reader, have dramatically exceeded company expectations, delaying the expected shipment of some orders.

GalleyCat spoke with Mary Ellen Keating, Barnes & Noble's Senior VP of corporate communications & public affairs for more details. According to the spokesperson, the first Nook pre-orders will be shipped on November 20. However, the company expects to ship more recent Nook pre-orders on December 11.

Nevertheless, Keating urged holiday shoppers to hurry with pre-orders: "I think we always had high expectations for the device, but what we've seen in terms of preorders has exceeded our expectations," she explained. "We're encouraging people to order soon, we want to make sure people who really want the device get it before the holidays."

After five years as editor-in-chief of the Paris Review, Philip Gourevitch has stepped down--leaving open one of the most coveted spots in literary journalism.

Most recently, Gourevitch was the co-author of "Standard Operating Procedure." According to the NY Observer, Paris Review Foundation director Terry McDonnell, New York Review of Books editor Bob Silvers, and Paris Review founder Peter Matthiessen will lead a literary search party to replace the editor.

Gourevitch admitted that he was worn out from working on a new book while editing the journal. Here's more from the article: "Mr. Gourevitch said he felt like he'd done a pretty good job holding it together, but that he felt 'extremely exhausted;' at the end. 'I didn't want to do that again,' he said."

GalleyCat made the front page of Louisville, Kentucky's Courier-Journal today, briefly quoted about the state of Twitter literature.

The newspaper story focused on two young writers who hope to land a book deal for their enormously popular Twitter feed, the Fake AP Stylebook. The website pays comic homage to "The AP Stylebook," the metaphorical Bible for resolving all journalistic style issues. According to the article, agent Kate McKean from Howard Morhaim Literary Agency has already spoken with Random House and Little, Brown about the project.

Here's a peek into the living room co-writer Mark Hale, a recession-era publishing success story: "Hale, meanwhile--whose living room has no couch but a large aquarium, some cats and a bookshelf packed with graphic novels--is trying to adjust from being an unemployed food-service worker (whose main responsibilities were job hunting, housekeeping and pet-tending--to co-creator of the latest Web phenomenon."

Celebrity book deals have always stoked passionate opinions among GalleyCat readers and one magazine has taken a special look at a particular sub-genre of this polarizing literary trend: celebrity poetry.

Over at Details magazine, a short poetry quiz urges discerning readers to connect celebrities with their enigmatic verses. The wide-range of styles includes work by popular poets like Jewel (pictured, via), Michael Jackson, Suzanne Somers, and William Butler Yeats.

Here's more from the site: "Celebrity Poetry [is] a much-maligned and misunderstood American literary genre that's enjoying a bit of extra attention right now, thanks to the rediscovered cosmic versifications of Michael Jackson. (Alas, yes, 'twas the late King of Pop who composed sweetly sublime lines such as "Planet Earth, my home, my place/ A capricious anomaly in the sea of space.") Lyrical musings have put MJ in the company of poetic luminaries like Leonard Cohen, Rosie O'Donnell, Billy Corgan, Jewel, Mr. Spock, and Suzanne Somers. But how well, dear scholar, do you really know their work?"

Today Harlequin Enterprises announced the formation of Carina Press, a digital-only imprint with a special contract that "does not include an advance or DRM (Digital Rights Management), and authors are compensated with a higher royalty."

The imprint will begin publishing in Spring 2010, focusing on romance and erotic romance. Angela James (pictured) will serve as executive editor of the new press. James has served as copy editor at the digital publisher, Ellora's Cave and managed the publisher's editorial services division at Samhain Publishing. Most recently, she worked on the now-disbanded digital outfit, Quartet Press.

Here's more about submission guidelines: "Carina Press is currently accepting submissions in all genres of commercial fiction. Carina Press will 
consider shorter stories, genre novels of 50,000 to 100,000 words and longer, and complex narratives of over 100,000 words. Carina Press will also acquire books that have been previously released in print form, but for which the author has either retained digital rights or had digital rights revert to them. All submissions should be sent to submissions [at] carinapress [dot] com."

The Asian American Writers' Workshop is hosting "Page Turner," its first all-day literary festival, this Saturday at Brooklyn's powerHouse Arena—and on Friday night, the Workshop will present Sonny Mehta with its Lifetime Achievement Award in a ceremony that features an appearance by one of Knopf's literary stars, Michael Ondaatje. There are two levels of access to the Friday night event: $50 lets you in on a cocktail reception at 7 p.m., but for $500 you can stick around for the gala dinner afterwards. (Both tickets include full access to Saturday's events, which are also priced separately or on a day-pass.)

Full disclosure: GalleyCat senor editor Ron Hogan is one of many guest speakers Saturday; he'll be moderating a discussion about "Queering the Asian-American Coming of Age Story" with novelists Alexander Chee, Abha-Dawesar, and Rakesh Satyal that afternoon.

Raymond Carver's famous short story collection title has become one of the blogosphere's most popular headline jokes.

As writers churn out more and more content for the Internet age, one Gawker writer discovered that the "'What We Talk About When We Talk About [X]' (WWTAWWTAX) construction" has become one of the most popular quick and dirty headlines. The title is taken from Carver's classic collection (and short story of the same name), "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love."

Here's more from the post: "it's showing off. It's pandering--signaling to a certain preferred reader : 'This one's for you, you brilliant appreciator of contemporary short fiction!' and to another reader: 'Stay away, cretin!' The majority of these publications' readers probably do occupy that demographic and temporal hot spot for which Carver is sort of an unofficial poet laureate. Most of the people reading this do. I definitely do. (In fact the first time I spotted a WWTAWWTAX headline I was so amused/pleased with myself for getting the reference, that I tweeted about it.)"

Unmasked: The Final Years of Michael Jackson is today's Book of Color. This book, written by Ian Halperin, recounts the end of Michael Jackson's life. He predicted in December 2008, and announced to everyone in the world, that Michael Jackson would die in six months. Tragically, in the end, Ian Halperin was correct.

Halperin explains that what actually killed the King of Pop was the greed of others around him. Forced to launch the concert series in London drained Michael Jackson of his mental and physical health. Everyone, Michael Jackson's advisors included, knew that the tour was madness, but they still pushed for it to try and make the millions that the concerts would have generated. In his last years, Michael covered his ailing health by crazy costumes and cosmetics. Halperin details the crazy and thrilling last years of his life.

Ian Halperin is a former winner of the Rolling Stone "Award for Investigative Journalism," and has written books on Celine Dion, James Taylor, and Kurt Cobain.

Over the weekend an indie adaptation of the novel "Precious" by Sapphire opened in just 18 theaters around the country, but managed to set some impressive records.

Entitled "Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire," the film tells the story of Precious Jones--an illiterate teenager who is sexually and physically abused by her parents before meeting an inspiring teacher in Harlem. The film was executive produced by Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry, adding some blockbuster support to the small film.

Here's more from IndieWire: "The film--which has been the source of much anticipation and buzz since its Sundance debut in January - grossed a stunning $1,800,000 from just 18 theaters over the weekend, averaging an essentially unheard of $100,000. That gives it the third best live action per-theater-average of all time, surpassed only by 2006's 'Dreamgirls' and 2005's 'Brokeback Mountain.'"

Since she spent years living in between New York City and Alaska, Joan Kane's poetry crisscrosses two vastly different worlds. In this video interview, she described how these two places influenced her new book, "The Cormorant Hunter's Wife."

Kane was one of the ten writers honored at the 25th annual Whiting Writers' Awards last week. GalleyCat prowled the aisles of the 2009 Whiting Awards, interviewing a number of the winners about their writing lives, the recession, and the future of literature. The ten recipients each took home a $50,000 award for their literary efforts.

Here's more about the author: "Kane is Irish and Inupiaq Eskimo, with family from King Island and Mary’s Igloo, Alaska. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Harvard College and her M.F.A. from Columbia University ... In 2009 her play, 'The Gilded Tusk,' won the Anchorage Museum theater contest."

In a New Yorker blog post this week, James Surowiecki questioned the American Booksellers Association's "dubious" claims about "illegal predatory pricing" by Wal-Mart (WMT) in its Book Price War with Amazon.com (AMZN). Here's more: "[T]here's just no reason to believe that Wal-Mart is cutting prices now in order to raise them later: the company's entire history has been one of perpetual cost-cutting, even after it's become the country's dominant retailer."

GalleyCat has been tracking the stock performance of the major companies that influence the bookselling business. We created this chart with eight publicly-traded publishing stocks hand-picked by our readers--including company name, symbol, current stock price, and price increase or decrease at week's close.

-Name- -Symbol- -Last price- -Change-
The McGraw-Hill Co. MHP 29.32 -0.14
Books-A-Million, Inc. BAMM 8.15 0.23
Borders Group, Inc. BGP 2.06 -0.05
Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN 126.2 5.59
Barnes & Noble, Inc. BKS 17.05 0.18
Wiley John & Sons Inc. JW.A 36.5 0.22
Scholastic Corporation SCHL 25.3 0.09
News Corporation NWS 14.15 0.04
Google Inc. GOOG 551.1 2.45
Apple Inc. AAPL 194.34 0.31
Sony Corporation SNE 28.84 0.11