From NaNoWriMo to “No Shave November,” the month of November has, for some reason, become the go-to month for doing or not doing a particular thing for the whole month. I’m not sure why this happened – I guess some of the alliteration is nice, but as far as the general mood of things, it seems to me like February is the month most in need of some arbitrary motivational scheme to make getting through it suck less.

Anyway, here we are!

National Novel Generation Month or NaNoGenMo is one of these months, and it’s particularly fun because it’s an excuse to play around with computational creativity as well as a venue for showing off your computationally creative products.

As part of an ongoing research project I’ve been working on a database of metadata and analyses of the works generated for NaNoGenMo. Browsing that database (a work in progress) may give you a sense of what people tend to do for this event, but we’ll look take a closer look at several examples.

Like all the other projects in this class, we’re spending about two weeks on this. I realize, of course, that November is longer than two weeks, and I also should acknowledge that the novels I’ve successfully completed for NaNoGenMo (a wordless graphic novel in 2014 and an 800-page children’s book in 2017) always take me past the end of the month. I think we can still get some interesting things together in the time we have scheduled, and of course you can always keep workig on it until the end of November.

In terms of the assignment, your job is to write a computer program that will generate 50,000 words, and then share your code and your final product in Github.

In terms of the official NaNoGenMo event, it’s up to you if you want to share your work in an issue thread. I recommend you share it – this is a friendly community that I’ve always found supportive to new people – but you don’t have to. If you don’t want to share it on your own, I can also do a post on behalf of the class.

I’ve got two ideas started: a novel made from image descriptions and a NaNoGenMo retrospective.

So what will you make? How it will it work? Let’s get to it!