We have a 50k leaderboard and a 25k leaderboard with trackbear. We also have a discord server (with genre-based and help-based chat rooms), which will be perfect for sprints or word crawls!

If you're interested, you can learn more at r/nanodiaspora2024.

Happy writing!!

Hi! If you’re in Scotland (or nearby), and are looking for a very active group for November and beyond, you are welcome to join us.

I was the ML for Glasgow & West of Scotland region, and the Discord group continued independent of NaNo. We’re doing the same 50k challenge this month, and are active year-round with other challenges. Most are in the 20 - 40 age range, but we have members of all ages, and a welcoming, diverse group.

We have a couple dozen events planned for November, and more are online, so don’t worry if you can’t make it to the in-person ones in Glasgow.

The link is here: https://discord.gg/9wqkge25Gr (Should always work, I think.)

Stealth edit: Our kickoff party is tonight, and goes on until midnight.

Hope to see you there!

I am planning to do the writing challenge by hand this year and a friend of mine though that maybe there is an app that I could use to count the words (take a picture - have an app count the words - done!). Anyone has something to recommend?

I have also seen voice-to text recommendations but since I won't write in English that would not work.

So far behind on this series ... and work exploded to the point where I'm not sure I'm going even try NaNo this year ... ah well. All I can do is move forward.

Today his Halloween where I am, and probably where you are, too. Holidays in general need a bit of attention in your worldbuilding. It is easy to create analogues of Christmas or the Solstices in your world, but what else is out there in your world that helps people mark the passage of time?

Holidays are also used to emphasize our communal living. Secular American culture celebrates Hallowe'en, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years. For some Opening Day of Baseball is a holiday. Our religious folk have Easter, Passover, Diwali (which is now, I think), Eid, and a long list of holidays I can't pull out of my memory but that's what Wikipedia is for.

Holidays can also be personal. Earlier generations in my family decided there was too long of a gap between the holidays so they invented "Dumb Day" and celebrated by exchanging really cheap gifts (like, a quarter in a gumball machine for toys cheap). It is a small thing.

Holidays reflect the environment and season. Your world may be on a spaceship or a space station that doesn't even have seasons, so how do people mark time and their history and their community?

Spend some time writing up a holiday, why it exists, what it means for your storyworld, and most importantly what it means for your characters.

With so many writers and readers just finding out about us now, we wanted to extend our inaugural challenge to welcome those looking for a community but wanting to separate from NaNoWriMo! All writers and readers are welcome as we WHAM! - Writing Hard All Month - and POW! - Perusing Over Words - while working towards earning our exclamation point!

We have a forum HERE, where more details can be found, and we'd love to have you join us!

xox

With the eve of Nanowrimo closing in on us, even if you'd like to participate in the official event the organization is lacking many MLs to run regions and the forums are still closed. Additionally, there is little updates on the actual site (although they've been active on FB where they can control comments). What are your plans this November?

I am a Texas State University student who is conducting a journalism story on Nanowrimo 2024 participation for my Multi-Media Journalism course. I won't be using this poll as part of my project, as my professor wants us to collect data from outside sources, but I have a personal curiosity to satiate.

If any current/former MLs and/or participants would like to share their plans with me in a short audio/video interview and are comfortable with disclosing their government name please let me know!

View Poll

I’m really sorry, this isn’t on the topic of writing—but I LOVE trackbear’s setup and graph and stats and I was wondering if anyone knew any websites like it but more flexible for other goals, non-writing related. I won Nano six years in a row and the graph was always such a motivator for me; I know having for other goals would help a ton. Thanks a ton!

First off, I am not officially participating in NaNoWriMo this year since that org sucks now, BUT I'm still writing 50,000 words on my own since I've done this every year since like 2015 and it helps me a TON!!! I was just wondering if you change your reading habits at all (and how) when trying to write 50,000 words in a month (or whatever your goal is). In the past I've never read while doing NaNoWriMo but I've got some books on loan from a library across the country so I need to finish those by December 1st so for the first time I'll be reading and writing this November. Wanted to see everyone's experience with this!! Thank you and good luck to everyone!

Does anyone know of virtual write-ins that are scheduled for November? I've been having trouble finding options this year since event planning hasn't been as centralized since NaNoWriMo's collapse.

Hi everyone! I'm planning an informal launch for the month and am looking for a word crawl challenge to introduce and see if anyone is interested. Does anyone have any theme ideas or links to themes? Being themed on genres or books or libraries is something I'm thinking (but no specific series like HP). Can anyone help me? I'm probably going to have to throw something together but I'm at a loss for what to really do right now.

Hi all! My 25+ friendly writing group is hosting a NaNoWriMo alternative in November and I wanted to extend an invite here.

Our group has been running our own challenges since NaNoWriMo last November and we have some form of writing challenge ongoing most of the time. We're closing up our "preptober" alternative now and last month we ran a dialogue writing challenge. If you're interested, I'll drop the link below.

A little bit about our group and the NaNoWriMo alternative:

• Our members are all 25+ with average age around late 20s to mid 30s
• We're very lgbtqia+ and neurodivergent friendly!
• We have a group server tracker for NaNoWriMo with alternative goal options because we believe in fostering a welcoming environment for all regardless of time availability, health, etc.
• We'll be offering a server Winner's Certificate to all of our NaNo winners regardless of the personal writing goals that are set
• For the month of November we'll have daily writing check-ins, writing discussion prompts/writing inspo, regularly scheduled group writing sprints, and channels to share writing (with and without feedback requests)

This link should never expire: Coze & Prose Writing Server [25+] 💚

Our weekly discussion thread to discuss all things to do with writing! You can get help with ironing out a plot hole or two, ask for a prompt to get the juices flowing as well as talking about how your Nanowrimo project is looking.

No self promotion please and please also keep your tone civil. Moreover, we are open to suggestions via modmail as to what you want to see in the sub.

Tell us about your project here!

I'm not planning on using the site anymore, but my account is still there and active and I haven't received any emails from them since August 1. I genuinely thought they were such a mess that they forgot to send out emails about it lol until I brought it up to someone else and they said they'd received a couple this month. Now I'm kind of wondering why I didn't get any.

So I'm asking this as a new writer since this is the first year I am seriously committed to writing on a consistent basis. I have been writing a few hundred words a day for the past few months and I have been trying to read a bit each day since that helps keep the brain sharp.  I'm not delusional I know i'm not a great writer and I have a crap ton of different ideas for stories but I'm terrible at planning and i'm not really sure how to get better at writing , planning or to just write more actual story but I would like to get better, i just don't really know how.

If any of you guys have been in this for a while or just have something to say, is there anything you would suggest I do each day other than just write a few hundred words and do some reading. Is there anything else I can do each day to get better at writing as a newbie?

Thanks!

We're only a few days away! This is my first Nano and I'm excited to keep track on trackbear instead but that's not the point lol.

I finally figured out a couple main points and a setting but besides that, I'm gonna be a pantser and see where my characters take me. Finally starting my manuscript after stalling for literal years

Very excited! Hoping to get 50,000 words but I'll deem it a success if I get to 25,000.

Anyone have some last minute tips for first timers? What forums can I join to keep me going?

Book or Bust is an inclusive discord server in the spirit of NaNoWriMo, except that writers set their own monthly writing goals all year round and compete on teams to reach them. This November, we hope you will join us for our more traditional NaNo-style writing challenge, BoBvember:

✏️ Track your word count with our google sheet, example here, which updates your word count on our #bob-progress channel.

🏆 Compete on a team! Each month, the three teams that achieve the highest percent of their goals met are announced winners.

⚔️ Sprint with us! Every word you write in sprints helps us defeat our bot-run enemies, such as The Block and his many minions.

💬 Join our dedicated #BoBvember channel with time-honored threads such as “Your progress in gifs” or “Plot bunny adoption station”.

BoB has supported writer productivity since 2020, and our members have finished manuscripts, edited, gotten published, queried, and started whole new projects. We hope that if you join us in November for a month-long sprint, that you’ll stay with us for the multi-year marathon that is a productive writing career.

Link to join!

Hey guys. I have made a nanowrimo group on here for northern Europe, not to exclude any one, but as a way to find other aspiring writers "in the area". So if you're up for nanowrimo and living in northern Europe, why not check it out? It's pretty quite right now, but I rooting for that to change ;)

Here's the link :

r/NANOWRIMO_nordic r/NANOWRIMO_nordic

Gooooood day!

- So I am aware that things seem iffy with the people behind nanowrimo, I tried getting into it, but frankly don't quite know what it is all about, as someone new to this thing, I have wanted to join for some time now and decided this year was it, I didn't expect there to be troubles, but things happens. I would therefore want to state that I am just a person wanting an excuse to write and hoping to find some community and the only thing I knew of where nanowrimo, so yeah, Just wanted that out there.

Hi all. I send a newsletter to writers every two weeks and this week I'd like to include a list of alternatives to Nano. If you know one, could you drop it in the comments please? I keep hearing about different options and then forget to bookmark/write it down and have to go looking again. A list would be deadly.
Thanks
NorahD

A drop in the ocean compared to everything else going on but just goes to show how little of a grasp they have on things that their security certificate on the website has expired days before their main event is due to start

EDIT: I am aware that it's now been fixed, but the point I think still stands.

If you were able to do it, how would you make this contest different.

Here are some potential options:

1. Make it on a different month

2. Make it longer or shorter than a month

3. Change the word count

4. Have a month for plotting and then a month for writing. Pantsers could skip the first month.

5. Make the word count different for different genres, because some genres tend to have longer books than others.

6. Instead of word count, just make the goal be to write the beginning, middle and end of your story.

7. Make it 2 months long with 4 break-weeks so you can rest.

Ok, so none of the ideas I've got are all that mind-blowing, but maybe you folks have some more exciting ideas than I do.

One of the good things about everyone taking a different path this year is that maybe the cultural phenomenon of writing a novel in Nov. can change a bit and be improved! I know lots of people already change the rules for themselves and create their own goals, I'm glad such innovation is happening and I hope it happens more this year.

Curious if there are any other people in Dresden, Germany writing. I don't know if I'm ready for a regular meetup, but I think meeting at least once to write together could be nice.

I've been taking part in Nano in a European region since 2010 and was occasionally semi-involved in organizing things (a friend of mine was the ML). We've decided to jump ship for obvious reasons and are organizing our own thing this year, including a kick-off.

So far, the number of people who've RSVP'd is pretty low. We expected lower numbers of course, but it's still a bit of a shame, especially since meetups have always been a huge part of the experience in our region. With Nanowrimo gone, for all intents and purposes, I wonder if there's any way to find (or advertise) Nano-esque writing groups in your region? I haven't found any yet, but maybe I haven't been looking in the right place...

I have always wanted to write a book and the idea of nano has always appealed to me. Because of the latest controversy, I am less inclined to support them. I still want to write a book though. The cool thing about nano was it offered the opportunity to get your book out there, so now I’m wondering if there are any alternatives that I could use?

Anyone else planning to use a typewriter or other “non-digital” writing method? I plan to scan the completed pages to get my word counts. Thoughts or suggestions for anyone else that has utilized a typewriter versus computer or tablet?

I’m new to this I’ve not done it before but I heard about the idea a few months ago and got excited about the concept I haven’t written anything in ages. But I thought I saw somewhere that even though it started as a novel-writing challenge that it had changed over the years and that there was going to be inspo prompts and it could be a collection of short stories or a world with the same character in different scenarios depending on the prompt etc… no idea where I saw that and now can’t find any mention of it anywhere and now it’s looking more like it’s about writing 50k words on one thing/story in 30 days. Am I missing something or is that what it is? If so it’s fine I can google prompts in other places, I was just hoping the website would be the one to provide them

Hi everyone! I'm new this year and am working on my first novel.

I see a lot of suggestions for word count tracking tools, but I haven't been able to find a recommendation that also includes start/end time so it can calculate words per hour for me.

How are y'all calculating that? Is there a website, google/excel sheet template, or maybe an app? Open to any suggestions! Thanks!

Ok, I might go there because the forums are straightforward and easy for me to navigate lol. They might add more categories if there is enough interest.

https://gothnowrimo.proboards.com/#category-8

With NaNoWriMo out of the window for me, I was considering other options when I came across Write November.

https://writershq.co.uk/write-november-2024/

Anyone else seen this?

William George Jordan's The Power of Personal Influence*relies on the idea that people radiate personal influence, and are receptors of other peoples' influence. This is what a person really is, not who they pretend to be.

There are men and women whose presence seems to radiate sunshine, cheer, and optimism. You feel calmed and rested and restored in a moment to a new and stronger faith in humanity. There are others who focus in an instant all your latent distrust, morbidness, and rebellion against life. Without knowing why, you chafe and fret in their presence. You lose your bearings on life and its problems.

So think about how your characters radiate their influence. This seems like a good technique to make even minor characters stand out as real people. I'm sure we all have different tuning mechanisms, as well, so that character A finds character B helpful but character C find character B smarmy. Thus, conflict is born out of character.

Jordan continues to point out that we can in fact control what kind of personality we radiate, but it unless that skill is cultivated, it reveals who we are. So in the example above, B may be smarmy but good at hiding it, and A has a faulty bullshit detector or C might have a very sensitive one.

Think about your characters in two networks. The face-value network between characters and their relationships by family or situation can be very different from the hidden network of attraction and repulsion. I don't use these terms in a sexual or romantic way here, but more in trust/distrust. Map out the relationships and how those relationships may change over the course of the story.

Your characters may not even understand why they respond to other characters the way they do. Again, the discrepancy between what people say and what they do causes intrigue when done correctly. It can also be fumbled and the reader finds the characters completely unbelievable or too disingenuous to want to be around.

Practice with one of your characters under the influence of one person, learning that person is a jerk, and shifting their trust to third character. How do you show this? How do you tell this?