NaNoGenMo

National Novel Generation Month - based on an idea Darius Kazemi tweeted on a whim.

Hey, who wants to join me in NaNoGenMo: spend the month writing code that generates a 50k word novel, share the novel & the code at the end

Editions

The Goal

Spend the month of November writing code that generates a novel of 50k+ words. This is in the spirit of National Novel Writing Month's interesting definition of a novel as 50,000 words of fiction.

The Rules

The only rule is that you share at least one novel and also your source code at the end.

The source code does not have to be licensed in a particular way, so long as you share it. The code itself does not need to be on GitHub, either. We're just using this repo as a place to organize the community. (Convenient because many programmers have GitHub accounts and the Issues section works like a forum with excellent syntax highlighting.)

The "novel" is defined however you want. It could be 50,000 repetitions of the word "meow". It could literally grab a random novel from Project Gutenberg. It doesn't matter, as long as it's 50k+ words.

Please try to respect copyright. We're not going to police it, as ultimately it's on your head if you want to just copy/paste a Stephen King novel or whatever, but the most useful/interesting implementations are going to be ones that don't engender lawsuits.

This activity starts at 12:01am GMT on Nov 1st and ends at 12:01am GMT Dec 1st.

How to Participate

Open an issue on the edition's repo and declare your intent to participate. If you already have some inkling of the kind of project you'll be doing, please title your issue accordingly. You may continually update the issue as you work over the course of the month. Feel free to post dev diaries, sample output, etc.

Also feel free to comment on other participants' issues.

Admins

Official admins for NaNoGenMo are @dariusk and @hugovk. We'll be doing our best to keep the issues section well organized and tagged.

Resources

There's an open issue for each edition where you can add resources (libraries, corpuses, APIs, techniques, etc).

There are already a ton of resources on the resources threads for old editions:

You might want to check out corpora, a repository of public domain lists of things: animals, foods, names, occupations, countries, etc.

See Also

That's It

Have fun!