We here at asdf Publishing love Habitica. For those that don't know about Habitica, they describe themselves thusly:
Habitica is a video game to help you improve real life habits. It "gamifies" your life by turning all your tasks (habits, dailies, and to-dos) into little monsters you have to conquer. The better you are at this, the more you progress in the game. If you slip up in life, your character starts backsliding in the game.
Habitica is free and completely open source. A number of our employees at asdf Publishing use it to help incentivize our daily tasks. For me personally, I'm such a fan of theirs that I've contributed to both their codebase and their wiki. Now I'm excited to announce asdf Publishing is launching our first annual "Sit Down and Write!" challenge on Habitica! This challenge is to promote all writers to participate in NaNoWriMo. If you aren't familiar, NaNoWriMo is a competition put on by the National Novel Writing Month nonprofit to promote creative writing. The goal is for participants to write a 50,000+ word novel in the month of November. As they put it:
Valuing enthusiasm, determination, and a deadline, NaNoWriMo is for anyone who has ever thought about writing a novel.
So how do you participate in the challenge? It's pretty simple:
Sign up for Habitica if you haven't already: https://habitica.com
Search for the challenge. The official name is: Sit Down and Write! Meet your NaNoWriMo goals with the help of asdf Publishing!
Use the challenge to prepare your writing project during the month of October
Sit down and write in the month of November!
How do the prizes work? The challenge will end December 1st. At that time, one winner will be chosen at random from the full list of participants and will receive 10 gems. Five runner-ups will also be chosen at random from the full list of participants and will receive 2 gems each. All other participants will just walk away with the pride in knowing they wrote an entire novel in a single month, though that's probably the best prize of all!
Note: This is not an official NaNoWriMo event. The terms “National Novel Writing Month” and “NaNoWriMo” are used with permission from the National Novel Writing Month 501(c)(3) nonprofit.