I was embarrassingly sweaty at our first meeting.
It was early July, 2025. I was parked on the side of the road, talking with longtime National Novel Writing Month volunteers, former staff, and Young Writers Program teachers.
The big question on the agenda: What could we do about NaNoWriMo?
After a rocky run, the team who’d taken over the organization in 2024 had announced they’d run out of money and were shutting everything down.
Soon, the website that had encouraged millions of writers over the past 25 years would disappear. And NaNoWriMo’s Young Writers Program, taught in over 10,000 classrooms, would vanish with it.
It seemed impossible.
I’d accidentally founded NaNoWriMo in 1999 and ran it until 2012. The event had turned my life upside down in the most wonderful ways. The anything-goes approach helped me find my voice as a writer. And the social side of the challenge—the write-ins and word sprints and wrap parties—introduced me to amazing people I never would have met otherwise.
I wasn’t alone! So many beloved books and lifelong friendships had started in NaNoWriMo.
The idea that hundreds of thousands of writers would show up on November 1 and find everything shuttered was heartbreaking.
We had to figure something out.
On the call, we brainstormed ideas. We talked about convincing a different nonprofit to take over the event or starting a new challenge from scratch. All of them required more energy, funding, and cooperation from NaNoWriMo’s board than we had.
The nonprofit’s reputation had also been tarnished by the past few years of questionable decisions and poor communication. We wanted to re-center the event around the joy of writing.
We knew it was possible. But the longer we talked (and the more I sweated) the more insurmountable the problems felt. Saving or restarting NaNoWriMo, we realized, was more than any one group could take on.
And that’s when the light bulb went off.
Maybe we needed to let go of the notion that National Novel Writing Month should be run by a single group or organization. Maybe the nonprofit’s end could be the start of a grassroots, open-source era for the event?
There were signs of it already happening.
We all knew people and classrooms, for example, who did NaNoWriMo every year without realizing there was a website. NaNoWriMo’s 500+ local chapters had always brought their own unique approaches and flair to the event. And a world of new tools and communities had been springing up, designed to help people set creative goals, track their progress, and find writing buddies.
Because these resources and groups were scattered across the internet, though, it could be tough to know how to find them. Particularly if you were new to NaNoWriMo.
This, we realized, was a problem we could solve.
By the end of the call, we had a very rough plan. We’d create a website to…
- Reassure folks the 2025 challenge was still happening
- Tell them how to take part
- Point them to inspiring resources and tools for their writing journey
Within a week, we registered a domain and started planning.
Even with our modest scope, getting a site up by early October was going to be tough. Everyone on the team was a volunteer, and few of us had known each other before that first call. We were juggling full-time jobs and family obligations and our own neglected writing projects.
Time was tight, but NaNoWriMo had shown us that good things happen when you combine an overly ambitious goal with a ridiculous deadline. We rolled up our sleeves and dove in.
We researched writing tools, set up Slack channels, and debated colors. We drew up editorial calendars, picked platforms, and made style guides. We explored CMSes and CDNs, created contributor agreements, solicited pep talks, and designed digital swag. We wrote pages and pages and pages of site text.
Each week, more folks joined the effort, bringing new skills and energy. We were underslept and over-extended, but motivated by the hope that we could help kids, teens, and adults on their November writing adventures.
Which brings us to today. Less than three months after that first meeting, our resource site is live!
On behalf of Tavia, Kristina, Tim, Kathy, Laura, Ansley, Byron, Coral, Gertrude, Lucie, Liz, Maria, and Sara, we’re so glad you’re here. We can’t wait to kick off NaNoWriMo’s 27th year of literary abandon with you on November 1.
We’ll be adding a bunch more fun stuff to the site and profiling a bunch of writing communities on our blog, so please check back!
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Happy noveling!