November is special for writers. There's a challenge to write a 50,000-word novel in a month called National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo for short. Since 2020, Virtual Coffee has held our own blogging challenge inspired by the NaNoWriMo.

The Virtual Coffee Blogging Challenge is a community project with a goal to write blog posts totaling 50,000+ words in the month. In 2020, we collectively wrote 38,075 words. We didn't make goal, but we all really enjoyed the challenge.

In 2021, we tried again and beat goal with 125,392 words! Then in 2022, we hit 106,978. In 2023, with 30 writers we wrote 150,083 words, a new group record.

You can see all the links to our posts and our tracker at the Virtual Coffee 2023 blogging challenge Page.

New this year

In previous years, the challenge was focused on tech. But since there's more to life than tech, this year we're opening it up to non-tech articles. This year, we’ve pushed our challenges to include more of who we are outside of tech, including this year's Photography Challenge and our December Creative Community Challenge. We're more than code. Maybe this year we'll see some fiction, poetry, or a personal biography.

We All Need Goals

Having a goal helps us to track our progress. Our starting goal is always 50,000 words. If we break our initial goal, we'll add a stretch goal, try to beat it, and repeat.

We don't have a theme this year but we do have prompts and suggestions listed on the bottom of the Challenge page.

Write with us

Writing allows us all to grow our network and community. Do you want to write? You don't have to be a part of Virtual Coffee to participate. Are you worried about how to get started or do you need a suggestion?

Hacktoberfest just ended and DEV has a Hacktoberfest Writing Challenge running until Nov. 3. We expect to see some articles about our member's Hacktoberfest experience. (I'm personally waiting until the first to begin my review, so I can count it towards our word count.)

If you don't want to try to hit 50,000 on your own, that's OK. Start by setting a personal goal for how much you want to write this month. You can focus on word count or number of articles. I always try to beat my word and article count from the previous year.

Goals

How do you track your words?

TrackBear lets you track words, time, and page count. You can set writing goals or targets.

Are you looking for more inspiration? Here are some talks from Virtual Coffee members that write as part of their careers.

How to grow your tech career through writing Jessica Wilkins' talk on writing for tech. This is a talk Jessica gave that helped kickoff our blogging challenge a few years ago.

Let's get blogging with Julia Julia Seidman lunch and learn kicked off our 2023 challenge.

Write, Learn, Enjoy

I love this challenge. It's great because it forces me to write more often and there's also support from fellow writers. We encourage each other to write, and it’s great to read everyone’s articles. It's fun to watch the progress bar on our tracker page fill out.

You can follow us at the 2024 Virtual Coffee blogging challenge page

Good luck with your writings.