Guides

The Writing Year After November

Published September 8, 2026 · Last updated October 19, 2026

November ends, but the calendar built around it doesn't stop there. What comes next is quieter and more spread out: one small event most weeks, a handful of larger ones tied to specific months, running all the way through the following summer.

Most of it is organised around novels. The rhythm it teaches — draft fast, leave it alone, revise, send it somewhere — is the one an essay, a screenplay or a run of articles ends up on too, a few months later and with less company.

December: editing, not drafting

The month right after November has its own purpose in at least one of the initiatives that ran through it: ProWritingAid's Novel November moves from a 50,000-word drafting goal in November into a December stage built around revision and pitching literary agents (ProWritingAid, accessed September 2026).

That shift matters more than the calendar date attached to it. A first draft finished at speed in November usually needs a different kind of attention in December: reading it as a whole rather than a page at a time, deciding what actually belongs, and only then thinking about who might read it next.

AutoCrit's Novel 90, a free 90-day challenge that started on October 1, 2026, keeps the same order, planning in October, drafting in November and editing in December (AutoCrit, accessed September 2026). Whatever November produced, December is generally when the manuscript itself starts being treated as something other than a first draft.

The reason this stage gets its own name, rather than folding quietly into whatever comes next, is that revising a full draft is a different task from writing one, done at a different pace, usually alone rather than alongside a community sprinting toward the same daily count.

Having a named month for it, even an informal one, gives that slower, less visible work a place on the calendar instead of leaving it to happen whenever a writer eventually gets around to it.

Every Friday, all year: a small contest

Underneath the seasonal peaks, one weekly rhythm runs continuously regardless of month: Reedsy posts five short-fiction prompts every Friday, gives writers a week to submit a story built around one of them, and awards $250 to a winner chosen from the entries (Reedsy Creative Writing Prompts, accessed September 2026).

It's small, short, and doesn't require a novel-length commitment, which makes it one of the only pieces of this calendar that runs the same way in March as it does in November.

For a manuscript that's resting after a big push, or one that hasn't started yet, it's a way to keep a weekly writing habit going without it needing to be the same project every time.

July: summer's smaller version

Camp NaNoWriMo was the off-season sibling of the November tradition, lighter on structure and built around a goal of your own rather than a fixed word count. No organisation ran a session of it in July 2026: the nonprofit behind it shut down on March 31, 2025, and nobody has rebuilt it.

The summer version that does exist comes from the organizer already named for December. ProWritingAid runs a free Novel Summer Camp from July 13 to August 7: four weeks around a goal you set, a word count, a revision milestone or a plotting target, with tracks for editing and revision, on a free ProWritingAid account.

Where November asks for fifty thousand words of a specific kind, the summer camp leaves the target and even the kind of work up to whoever's taking part, which suits a manuscript that needs finishing more than it needs starting.

July is also when Wattpad opens submissions for its annual Wattys awards, its longest-running contest for serialized fiction on the platform: the 2026 window ran July 2-23, with a shortlist announced around mid-September and winners named in early December (Wattpad, 2026).

That's three separate months for one contest: a few weeks to submit, roughly two months of waiting while a shortlist gets assembled, and a final announcement on December 2, in the same week the December editing stages of Novel 90 and Novel November begin.

For a story serialized on the platform, that gives it a second, entirely different kind of deadline to write toward, one built around finishing rather than drafting from scratch. To enter, a story must be original, posted on Wattpad on or after January 1, 2024, marked complete, at least 40,000 words long, and written in English, Filipino, Spanish, Portuguese or Bahasa Indonesia.

How the pieces connect for one manuscript

None of these tracks require picking just one, and a single project can plausibly move through several of them across a year without any of it being unusual.

A novel drafted in November can spend December being revised rather than pitched immediately, rest through the winter, and reach July as the project a writer finally finishes during the summer camp's looser, goal-of-your-own structure.

A short scene cut from that same manuscript during revision doesn't have to be wasted; reshaped, it's a plausible submission to a Friday prompt months later, using the same characters in a different kind of container.

There's no required sequence here. It's simply how the pieces of the calendar happen to line up for anyone who wants to use more than one of them on the same book.

What's missing from this list

A few larger professional gatherings for writers exist in the months this page doesn't cover in detail, but confirmed 2026 dates for them weren't available from primary sources at the time this was written, so they're left out rather than guessed at.

The dates here, for the Wattys, Reedsy, ProWritingAid and AutoCrit, come from each organizer's own pages.

The shape of the year, at a glance

Why this matters for how the year actually feels

Following all year doesn't require picking a single event. The practical read is simpler: the writing calendar has three visible peaks, October, November, and July, and one steady weekly rhythm running underneath all of them.

A manuscript started in November has somewhere to go in December, a summer with room to either draft something new or finally finish something older, and a small, low-stakes contest available most Fridays in between, whether or not the writer who started it ever signs up for anything else on this list.

Seen laid out this way, the year stops looking like one deadline in November followed by eleven quiet months, and starts looking like what it actually is for most people who keep at this for more than a single season: drafting, then revising, then resting, then drafting again, on a schedule that was mostly already there before anyone decided to follow it on purpose.

Questions

What should I do with my draft in December? Treat it as something other than a first draft.

Read it as a whole rather than a page at a time, decide what actually belongs, and only then think about who might read it next. That is a different task from drafting, done at a different pace and usually alone.

Are there writing events between December and next November? Yes. A weekly short-fiction contest runs every Friday, all year. July has a summer writing camp and the submission window of a contest for serialized fiction, open to complete stories of at least 40,000 words, and October is a preparation month before November.

Is there a summer version of the November writing month? Yes, though not Camp NaNoWriMo: no organisation has run a session of it since the nonprofit behind it shut down on March 31, 2025. ProWritingAid, which runs Novel November, also runs a free Novel Summer Camp from July 13 to August 7, four weeks around a goal you set yourself, with tracks for editing and revision. It needs a free ProWritingAid account.

Can one manuscript go through several of these events? Yes, and nothing requires picking just one. A novel drafted in November can be revised in December, rest through the winter and be finished in July. A scene cut during revision can become a Friday prompt entry months later.