NaNoGenMo 2016
National Novel Generation Month 2016 officially starts today.
I’ve talked about NaNoGenMo a lot before, but I think an introduction is in order for people who are new to it or who want to learn more about it.
So what is it? NaNoGenMo is a way for people to get together and make a thing that generates a novel, using NaNoWriMo’s definition of a novel: 50,000 words.
The way it’s organized is a bit unusual: it uses GitHub, a site for sharing open source projects, as a forum. Specifically, all of the threads are in the Issues section. There’s quite a few threads started for this year already, as people announce projects.
Each year, there’s a Resources thread with links to things that may be useful. Previous years have included links to all kinds of useful tools; if you’re at all interested in text generation they’re worth reading.
People have made all kinds of novels as part of NaNoGenMo:
- A Voynich-manuscript inspired mysterious codex
- Mary Sue Fanfic
- Alice in Wonderland meets Moby Dick
- Dreams
- Stories About Passive-Aggressive Roommates
- Artificial Intelligences learning about the world
- A mystery/thriller text-adventure simulator
- Graphic novels
- Generated clickbait articles about NaNoGenMo
- Fantasy Map Generator Travelogues
- The Annals of the Parrigues
- 50,000 meows
People have used all kinds of tools to make novel generators. While Python is popular, due to the natural language libraries available, people have used tools ranging from the very complicated to the very friendly: Tracery is a very accessible way to get started with text generation, while at the other end people have build complicated neural-networks.
While most of the novels have been in English, there have also been works in Armenian, French, Spanish, Finnish, and a procedurally-generated language.
I’ve participated every year; last year’s project was Virgil’s Commonplace Book. I wrote about it’s development on the project thread.
I look forward to seeing what everyone creates this year!