Participants aim to write a novel during the month setting themselves a challenging-but-reasonable word count goal. For our students, it provides them with the experience of seeing themselves as part of a global learning community. They can join forums to talk with other students about their writing and share problems of practice.
Tasmanian eSchool’s Year 9 and 10 students participated in the challenge, writing frantically during the four weeks of November, and editing and proofreading at the beginning of December. Our word tally was over 221 043 words, or approximately 443 pages of typed writing!
Students could write in any genre – fiction or non-fiction. Students wrote realistic young adult fiction, fantasy, memoir,science fiction, horror, poetry, essays, and self-help books, with several students writing more than 15000 words during the time-frame.
Congratulations to all of the Year 9 and 10 students who took on the challenge.
The first thing she notices upon waking is the hard ground beneath her. Having always slept on the most expensive mattresses made from the finest materials, waking up on the hard rocky ground is a surprise and not a pleasant one at that. She groans and the quiet muttering that had been filling the silence stops. Annalise cracks her eyes open and promptly closes them again. Rubbing them with the back of her hand she then opens them again, hoping she was seeing things just before.
She wasn't.
There is no roof above her, and no bed below her. Instead Annalise sees a canopy of trees blocking out the majority of the sky. She jumps up, all her weariness gone and spins around, her head up looking towards the sun that shines through the leaves of the trees.
Closing her eyes and breathing in deeply Annalise tries to push down all her worries and anxiety, and instead decides to use her authority to try and get away from wherever she is. Taking one more deep breath in she turns in the direction she heard the voices.