Exciting Season Updates!

Hey there, writers! It's Geata, your friendly neighborhood program advisor. I wanted to bring you all into the loop on what Edna and I are cooking up this year!

This year is our 6th season, if you can believe it. (My 5th with the challenge, which is equally unbelievable.) A lot has grown over the past several years. We've grown up, and the community has grown, too, for which we are so grateful.

As a thank you for everyone participating each year, we are working to deliver more value than ever. Here's a sneak peak of what we are hoping that will look like this year.

Preptober and Pep Talk Collaborations

We are working to partner with 5 members of the indie author community to deliver a total of 10 posts through October and November.

You can expect October to be full of helpful posts for preparing your story, all centered on using your unique humanity to flesh out your world.

November will bring posts equal parts encouraging and thought provoking, speaking to the specific point in the month you are in as well as matching with our bulletins through the month.

You can find those posts both here on the blog and on instagram. You can also expect to see promotional material in the coming months for the authors we are so lucky to partner with!

We hope to announce our collaborator list for this element sometime before the end of this month, so stay tuned. :)

Let's hear from you: who is an indie author you'd like to see collaborate with us?

More Interactive Opportunities in November

Write on Qs have been a part of our program on and off through the past years, and this year we are hoping to make those more frequent and more accessible for our participants.

Our WoQs have traditionally involved timed challenges, fun prompts, word count targets, and a dedicated space and time to work on your writing. We have experimented with hosting these on both Instagram and our Discord.

Our hope this year is to bring on more volunteers to run these events at multiple predictable times through the month. We are also hoping to find ways to make them more accessible to our participants, by recording the challenge as it unfolds as well as possibly exploring additional formats for them to run in.

Let's hear from you: what platform(s) would work for you to participate in interactive events?

Improved Forum Contribution

In the past couple years, we have been thrilled to see engagement on our forums (now "groups") grow as our participant base has expanded. This year we want to continue the trend and get people really coming together on our site.

We're hoping to connect with some of you who would have the time to make posts and interact with one another to make the groups feel more open and welcoming to new participants-- kind of like a hospitality team.

We also would be interested in exploring the possibility of running more activity threads with regular interaction through the month. We're thinking things like increasing the regularity of word wars, having interactive "write through the bulletin" threads, and maybe even running some other crawls through the month with people.

We also want to encourage more goal tracking and cheer leading, revisiting the idea of daily word count check ins as well as seeing what more we can do to encourage people in their writing.

Let's hear from you: what kind of community interaction would be valuable and fun for you?

Conclusion: An Invitation to Action

Reading through all these fun plans, I hope you are excited as we are. That being said, they will definitely take some people to make them happen!

If you love writing in November, and more importantly, building relationships with fellow writers, we want YOU!

In the coming weeks, we will be posting a volunteer application for NoQu26!

We would appreciate it if you would prayerfully consider taking the opportunity to join a fresh team to build our community to new heights.

If you can't wait for the volunteer application, feel free to reach out for additional information by emailing noquofficial@gmail.com with the title including "Geata" and "volunteer" (so that it's easy for me to search through). Eg, "Geata volunteer information request" or something similar.

I am so excited to hear from all of you.

Let's hear from you: all participants, regardless of your interest in volunteering, I would greatly appreciate it if you would leave comments on whatever questions I posed in this post so that I know what you guys would find most valuable going into this next season!