NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is November of each year. http://nanowrimo.org/ for the official site.
You have one month to write a novel from scratch. People have meetups in cafes, there are prizes on the site, there's a huge support community. It's a lot of fun. If you don't finish your novel, you still get a great experience and learn (hopefully) how to be a more professional writer - by getting into the habit of writing every day. The whole premise of the month is to write first, edit later. You write the entire first draft of your novel in one month, and then later one you can edit and revise at your leisure.
So here's what we are going to do with it.
A) If you'd like, sign up for a NaNoWriMo account. They are free, and they don't send spam. I've had mine for three years. All you need is an email.
B) I'm going to have a Google Document Spreadsheet with everyone's totals for word count, as well as links to their own google documents with their stories (if they have one. If you are writing offline, you can use nanowrimo to do official word counts, too.)
C) There will be a "Lobby" spread sheet, where people can talk, discuss, brainstorm ideas, ask for help, and critique/criticize each other if they would like. Totally NANo themed (similar to the writing document).
D) If you write better with the promise of a prize afterwards, there is a very simple reward system. You send me fifteen bucks. I put all of the fifteen bucks (including fifteen of my own) into a pot. At the end of the month, everyone who has finished their novel splits the pot! So if everyone ALL participates, and completes, there'll still be an extra buck that comes back on top of the original fifteen bucks. I wish I could do more, but money is tight for all of us. Oh, and even if I finish, I won't be getting the fifteen bucks back, sot hat's $15 automatically extra that gets divided amongst all the winners. Of course, EVERYONE wins, just by participating! IF you don't want to risk teh 15$, then don't do that part of the competition, and write just for the sake of writing and to prove you can. You definitely can do it.
