Novella November 2024 Announcement Post

Novella November 2024 Announcement Post

Hate AI, but love writing challenges?

Want to take part in a global, fun project to write a Novella in one month?

Grab some friends, and take part in Novella November, by writing 1,000 words a day for the month of November, ending with a 30,000 word Novella to test and stretch your novel-writing skills!

Your goal is not perfection, but merely getting into the habit of writing a litte bit every single day :D

No website, no sign-ups -- Just a community initiative to write using only your own word!

What are the rules? Just Three so far!

#1 - No AI

#2 - No Plagiarizing

#3 - Wordcount for the month should only come from what you write during the month.

What does that mean?

Only words written during November should go towards your Wordcount for the month... but! Feel free to use your 30k words as a continuation of previous writing, or just make it the first 30k words in a longer novel!

Don't think you can write a whole entire 30k word story? Write a series of short stories that total up to 30k!

Not ready to write original works yet? Write a 30k word fanfiction that you can post after the month is over!

Share your writing experience, tips, encouragement, and questions in the #Novella November tag!

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EDIT, from the tags: Want a progress tracker? Track your progress with TrackBear!

https://trackbear.app/

Don't have a word processor? Use LibreOffice , the free and open-source alternative to Microsoft Word!

Want to organize/storyboard your Novel and don't want to pay a subscription? Try 7writer by Simon Haynes!

Want to be able to listen to your story aloud for proofreading using TTS (text to speech)? Try Balabolka!

Or, create some custom progress / Goal Cards in advance you can fill out as you reach word goals! For ideas and templates, search this blog for "goal cards" :D

Want to do a writing challenge in more than just November? Check out my ideas here for year round challenges to keep you writing consistently! Got feedback? Send it in, I'd love to see everyone's ideas!

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EDIT 2: I almost forgot to mention, if you are unable to write/type your story, you can also narrate/dictate your story to your preferred recording device!

If you're doing a Recording only and it doesn't automatically generate a transcript, it would obviously be hard to judge the word count -- but you're also working with a lot of obstacles, so I'd say if you're able to complete your story via voice recording from start to finish, you've definitely achieved the goal!

Edit #3: added the title "Novella November 2024 announcement post" to the top to make it more standard with my Ominous October and Drabble December posts (will be updating Outline October shortly) , added "Official Announcement Post 2024" to the tags so people can easily find the monthly events for 2024, and added a bit of bold to the third bullet point in the original post from September 2nd 2024 for emphasis.

Monthly/Daily word goal cards #1

(Source on Pexels)

[Source on Pexels]

(Source on Pexels)

(Source on Pexels)

[ID: four images, each showing a calendar for the month of November labeled "Novella November" showing the dates and multiples of 1,000 below them, each with the calendar a different color and different photo backgrounds. The first is a white calendar with a galaxy background above a forest, the second is a black calendar with a large old tree in the middle of a forest, the third is a red calendar with a dark background of a tunnel, with the silhouette of a human in the center, and the fourth is bright green calendar with a background of various small succulent plants. End ID]

Want to make custom word-goal cards? you can use Pexels to find Free-to-Use stockphotos!

That's the spirit! I'm gonna be making some polls to see what everyone thinks of my proposed year-round, monthly events/themes for writing :D The key to writing successfully is doing it consistently, so you're already further along than I am ! 💙

Okay so that novella november thing is going quite well, 1059 words today, just gotta remember to do it tomorrow.

I realized a bit too late its not fucking november. It's september. Doesn't really matter, time isn't real and i dont care.

Do you know of any Free, Open Source writing tools and aids?

plain text: Do you know of any Free, Open Source writing tools and aids?

Please submit them, either in an ask, a PM, or in the *Replies* of this post so they're easy to keep track of!

In the opposite direction of pro-ai, subscription based ""resources"" for writers, I would love to put together a masterpost of *Free, Open Source* programs on this blog, to help out any aspiring writers out there!

Let's start with the very basics, shall we?

Free and Open Source Word Processor:

(plain text: Free and Open Source Word Processor)

LibreOffice is community-driven and developed software, and is a project of the not-for-profit organization, The Document Foundation. LibreOffice is free and open source software, originally based on OpenOffice.org (commonly known as OpenOffice), and is the most actively developed OpenOffice.org successor project.

#not committing #but authors should know how important semantics are #when establishing a set of rules for a competition

^ your tags from your reblog

I am autistic so honestly a bit confused but I am going to go out on a limb and assume you're being serious (and or half joking), so going to give this a response and also to help reassure another thing I was thinking about the other day when it comes to accessibility.

To clarify for you, assuming you're *not* joking, you are correct, the words that go towards your word count goal for November only count if it is your creative writing for November, not just any random text post you happen to use to communicate on the Internet.

And no, you cannot just grab a random 30k WIP from September and say you wrote it all in November to show off during the first week.

That is what rule #3 means. And .... I am going to assume the plagiarism bit you did is a joke because not being able to use the same few words across different sentences is not what plagiarism is in any way shape or form.

Plagiarism is when people take a work from someone else and copy it into their own and claim it as their own, sometimes opening up a thesaurus and changing a few random words to similes without any comprehension of just how badly they're fucking up because now not only are they cheating but its going to be even more monumentally obvious because when they turn that paper in its going to be absolute nonsense, especially when the person (usually a student) involved has never ever used the substituted words in a sentence before and has no idea what they actually mean and why its a big deal to substitute, say, the word "Cabinet" in "Cabinet Member" (a member of a political office of some sort) to now say "Chiffonier" because it sounds fancier now making the sentence include the words "Chiffonier Member" to describe a politician...

Anyways. Using the same words multiple times in your story is not Plagiarism. In fact, using the same words in your story is one of the ways you build your style and like, actually build your world, so I'm confused about the nitpicking here, since your tags seem to imply you're joking in your reblog.

For the record, this is not any kind of official "contest", there are no sweepstakes, no terms of use, no websites to sign up on, no binding contract, etc etc

This is a community-based challenge, like the original spirit of Nanowrimo and Inktober; a personal challenge for anyone who wants to give it a go, and a good way to help inspire and encourage others through sharing tips, answering questions, writing prompts, etc.

But, this did give me a good reason to finally add on, and I'll be editing the original to include it as well--

"Words on a page" are not the only way to complete Novella November!

If you are not able to write with a writing utensil on paper, or type on a keyboard comfortably or at all, please feel free to write your story in alternate media -- most smartphones come with an in-built "Recording" app, so you can dictate your story to your phone,

If you have a microphone set up on your computer, I know Windows 10/11 have in-built speech to text programs under accessibility tools, and more!

30k is the high goal for this challenge, but if you don't make it to 30k, you have not lost and you are not a failure -- the real goal of this challenge is to get yourself to write as consistently as possible, to get yourself into the habit of writing :)

to sum up my reply to your reblog:

You say "Authors should know how important semantics are"

I think its also fair to say "Authors should know how important *Context* is" before making what seems to be a mean-spirited response on a tumblr post about a community writing event in response to a popular event allowing cheaters."

Hate AI, but love writing contests?

Want to take part in a global, fun project to write a Novella in one month?

Grab some friends, and take part in Novella November, by writing 1,000 words a day for the month of November, ending with a 30,000 word Novella to test and stretch your novel-writing skills!

Your goal is not perfection, but merely getting into the habit of writing a litte bit every single day :D

No website, no sign-ups -- Just a community initiative to write using only your own word!

What are the rules? Just Three so far!

#1 - No AI

#2 - No Plagiarizing

#3 - Wordcount for the month should only come from what you write during the month.

What does that mean?

Only words written during November should go towards your Wordcount for the month... but! Feel free to use your 30k words as a continuation of previous writing, or just make it the first 30k words in a longer novel!

Don't think you can write a whole entire 30k word story? Write a series of short stories that total up to 30k!

Not ready to write original works yet? Write a 30k word fanfiction that you can post after the end of the month!

Share your writing experience, tips, encouragement, and questions in the #Novella November tag!

EDIT 1, from the tags: Want a progress tracker? Track your progress with TrackBear!

https://trackbear.app/

Or, create some custom progress cards in advance you can fill out as you reach word goals!

I thought most of those ideas were quite good. The one that doesn't quite sit well with me for no reason is scripting september. I *don't* have a good reason for it, nor a better one, (the closest i can think of is story september, with themes of fall, such as decay, literally falling (from power, from grace, or from the stairs), but idk.

Thank you for leaving feedback! I do like the idea of September having a Scripting + Regular writing option!

I really missed Script Frenzy (it's been gone 12 years apparently o.o) and September seemed like the perfect month for Script writing, but I'd definitely love to have "Fall" stories as an alternate theme for the month for those who prefer to write regular prose, especially the "Fall from power, fall from grace, or from the stairs" lol.