Challenge from: reminiscent-afterthought
With campnano on the horizon, I've been feeling a little nostalgic. A lot of us remember back when it was ScriptFrenzy - write 100 pages of script in the month of April. Sadly, it died due to lack of interest. Not enough people writing scripts. Not enough people donating to keep it afloat. And so campnano was born, including a feature where where we choose our goal - in words, lines or pages... But I know I'm also guilty of defaulting to prose and words.
And then there's NaPo, as well: National Poetry Writing Month where we write a poem a day all month. Novel, script and poems... That's three types of writing off the top of my head and that's just for April. So I was curious. What else is there? Wikipedia has a pretty thorough list, but here's my summarised version (avoiding repeats as best I could):
The purpose of these are to challenge us, but also to get us writing what we might otherwise not - or take an age in doing. I write poetry pretty regularly, and my novel crawls along - but some of the others? I barely work on those at all. And I've never tried drawing a manga or plotting out a game before. But why not? Even if it's not for you, you've nurtured a new idea - and you can always use your game to create a story or one of your story worlds to create the game. Even if the original forums that hosted these are dead, even if the only thing you might get back is personal satisfaction - why not give some of these a try? April's on the horizon and if you're not doing camp or NaPo (or even if you are and feel like being extra-daring), why not try the old spirit of ScriptFrenzy? And pull your socks up for writing a short story every day of May while you're at it!
I didn't know most of these existed until I looked. But they look like fun. How many of you didn't think of some of these until you saw this post (or the wikipedia page)? On that note, how did you find out about NaNo and all its siblings and other incarnations in the first place? I'm curious to know!
And that being said, if you try out any of these, feel free to share. There's almost nothing left of StoGo, for one, but it sounds like so much fun (and work, but it'd be interesting to learn more about programming.) Let's chat about all these different options and try some of them out - and offer pearls of wisdom we find along the way.