DenNoWriMo, or Denver Novel Writing Month, is the continuation of the traditional NaNoWriMo challenge to write 50,000 words in the month of November.
But DenNoWriMo is more than just a November challenge. We’re also a thriving writing community, with year-round local events as well as an active online presence.
We are, in short, keeping the original mission of NaNoWriMo alive, while evolving to meet the needs of our local community.
What Can I Expect During November?
Expect us to conduct November very much like we did during the good ol’ days when NaNoWriMo was something we could all love and trust. That means we’ll have:
- A kickoff party. If you’re new to this, the “kickoff” is a launch event held on October 31st. We start at 10pm to give everyone time to socialize and reacquaint themselves, and then at the stroke of midnight, we start to write! Think of this as a chance to build yourself a tidy little buffer. Everyone knows it’s not really tomorrow until you sleep, so when you wake up on the morning of November 1st, you can treat it like a new day and get 1,667 more words.
- Almost daily write-ins. We have an active region and typically have write-ins nearly every day throughout November. You can check available write-ins on our calendar of events, or if you don’t see one that works for you, create one!
- Regular pep talks, delivered straight to your inbox. Be sure to join our mailing list, as we send out emails in the weeks leading up to November, roughly every week during the challenge, and periodically throughout the rest of the year, filled with information about events and inspiration to keep you writing.
- A TGIO (thank goodness it’s over) party. November is a wild, crazy, fun ride, but it’s also exhausting! We throw a little party early in December to celebrate the month being over (and our free time being free again).
- A welcoming community, in November and beyond! There’s nothing quite like finding your people, and we won’t lie, that’s the biggest reason why we created DenNoWriMo. When NaNoWriMo imploded, they left a writing community-sized hole in many of our lives, and we couldn’t let our friends and fellow writers lose everything we’d all spent years building.
What Happened to NaNoWriMo?
At this point, you’re probably wondering: What on earth happened to NaNoWriMo?!
Yeah. Don’t worry, we still wonder how it came to this.
The short version is that headquarters made a series of arguably bad to very bad decisions, resulting in a loss of trust in the organization, a change in leadership, an exodus of staff, and a failure to fundraise. The result was that the organization was forced to shut its doors in early 2025 due to lack of sufficient funding.
We don’t want to go into too many details here, because DenNoWriMo’s focus is on continuing the joy rather than reliving the heartbreak. If you want to know more, you can find a detailed timeline of events at nanoscandal.com.