November is coming, and you know what that means… National Novel Generation Month!

The key word there is “Generation.” The basic idea is: write a computer program whose output is a novel.

It can be anything, as long as it’s 50K+ words and you share the source code and one example output. It doesn’t have to be sophisticated. You can just print out the same word 50,000 times, that’s OK. You can print random words 50,000 times, that’s OK. Naturally, most people try to do more than that though. Here are last year’s entries to give you an idea.

Last year’s iteration ended just around the time that ChatGPT was launched, so this will be the first time since GPTs hit the mainstream. It should be crazy! But one of the main goals is to be a learning experience, so it doesn’t have to be fancy. For example, one year I helped my kid cousin participate by writing a simple script, just to help them learn programming.

Anyway, I thought it was a natural match for the people here. Take a look, and think about participating!

• This year’s edition.
• Last year’s output.