The old challenge is gone. The month isn’t.

For over twenty years, the best-known annual novel-writing challenge was the reason a lot of first novels exist at all. Fifty thousand words in thirty days, alongside a few hundred thousand strangers doing the same. Then the nonprofit behind it ran into funding and community troubles, and in early 2025 it announced it was closing for good.

If November was the thing that kept your novel moving, that news landed hard. But it helps to be precise about what was actually lost. The website is gone. The challenge isn’t — because the challenge was never software. It was an agreement you made with yourself, witnessed by other folk.

Nobody owns fifty thousand words in thirty days. The idea survives the organisation, the way a recipe survives a restaurant.

What the old challenge actually gave you

Strip away the branding and the challenge came down to five things. Every alternative below is really a way of rebuilding some or all of them:

• 01A target. 50,000 words. Big enough to matter, small enough to be arithmetic: 1,667 words a day.
• 02A deadline. Thirty days, fixed. Deadlines are the only known cure for “someday.”
• 03Company. Other people at their desks at the same time. Not feedback, not critique — just presence.
• 04A tracker. Somewhere the number went up. Mildly ridiculous, completely effective.
• 05Permission to write badly. The quiet rule that made all of it work: quantity now, quality in December.

The Push — our standing November

Full disclosure before anything else: this guide lives on DraftFolk, and DraftFolk runs a 50K challenge. We built The Push because we missed that challenge and didn’t want its shape to disappear. So judge the next paragraph with that in mind.

The Push is fifty thousand words in thirty days. There is a November cohort everyone runs together, and a solo clock you can start in any month — the thirty days begin when you do. You write in the Writing Room, a distraction-free editor where your words are stored locally in your browser, on your machine, not on ours. It is free — every part of it — and there is no AI anywhere in the product. No assistant, no autocomplete, no model reading your draft. That is a founding rule, not a feature toggle.

What The Push doesn’t have yet: hundreds of thousands of participants. We are small and new, and if what you need most is the roar of a giant crowd, we won’t pretend to offer it. What you get is the target, the clock, the tracker, and the permission — the machinery that made November work.

Other alternatives worth your time

Different folk lost different things when it closed. Depending on which one you miss most:

If you miss the tracker: there are free, community-built word-count trackers made by folk from that old world. They do graphs, streaks, and shared leaderboards for informal groups, and they do it well. Pair one with any editor.

If you miss the game of it: a few apps turn your word count into a monster-battling RPG — write words, defeat creatures, earn gear. It is genuinely motivating for a certain kind of brain. Most are a paid subscription after the trial, so they sit in the “worth it if it works on you” column.

If you miss the write-ins: free write-in meetup groups run real-world and online sessions in hundreds of cities: you show up, say hello, and write in silence next to other humans. Local libraries and bookshops increasingly run November write-ins of their own — many kept going after the old challenge closed precisely because the demand didn’t go anywhere.

If you miss the forums: the old community scattered into Discord servers, subreddits, and small independent sites. The good news is that most genre and regional writing servers now run November sprints as a matter of course. The honest news is that no single place has re-gathered everyone, and probably none will.

Or run your own month

The fully independent version needs no platform at all:

• 01Pick thirty consecutive days and tell at least two people the dates. The telling is the contract.
• 02Set the target — 50,000 if you want the classic, less if your life says otherwise. A number you hit beats a number you admire.
• 03Log daily words somewhere visible — a spreadsheet on the fridge works better than an app you never open.
• 04Book your company in advance — standing writing sprints with a friend, twice a week, twenty-five minutes. Presence is the part you cannot fake solo.
• 05Decide now what December is for — resting, then revising. Fifty thousand November words are a first draft, and first drafts are allowed to be rough. That was always the whole trick.

Common questions

Is the old challenge still running? No. The nonprofit behind it announced its closure in early 2025. Nobody can run the original, but anyone can run a November.

Do I have to wait for November? No. November was an arbitrary container — any thirty consecutive days behave identically. The Push runs a November cohort for the shared-month feeling, and a solo clock for the other eleven months.

Is 50,000 words a real novel? It is a short one, or a strong start on a standard-length one — most adult fiction runs 70,000 to 100,000 words. The month is for momentum. The book gets finished in the months after, which is what Finish It is for.

What does any of this cost? Everything on DraftFolk is free — challenge, editor, prompts, all of it — with an optional supporter tier that keeps the lights on. Most trackers and write-in groups are free. The gamified apps are usually paid. Your own spreadsheet is famously free.