NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month is a novel writing challenge every November. The goal is to write 50 000 words in 30 days. It’s a real tough challenge but a fun one to partake in. On average, you need to write 1667 words per day of new story.
I participated a couple of times during high school when I had way more time at hand than I do these days. I’d love to do it again but between blogging daily in August with Blaugust and solving daily programming puzzles and writing about them in December with Advent of Code, a third daily challenge in a year is just bit too much.
I never got to 50k words but I did write a couple of fun starts for stories and learned a lot about writing. The NaNoWriMo community is also great: back in the day we had an active IRC channel, forums and local writing jams.