NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo is, quite frankly, the largest writing contest in the world. This contest encourages some of the worst writing in the world.
Confused? Don't worry all explain.

First off, NaNoWriMo (which, by the way, stands for National Novel Writing Month) is not really a contest. There are no prizes awarded for 1st place, and there are no losers. The object? Write a 50,000 word novel in a month.
The project was started in 1999 by Chris Baty and 20 friends. Their object was to write a novel in 30 days, that year, six people did it.
In 2000, a website was set up. 140 people joined, including many from foreign countries, and 21 people completed the challenge.
The next year, the number jumped to 5000. This was unexpected, and Chris and his friends scrambled to add the members to the website, which had not yet been automated.
In 2009 over 170,000 people signed up and 2,427,190,537 words were written.
That's a lot of words.
Chris Baty said in an interview that the contest is not about quality, it's about quantity. The whole goal is to turn of your internal editor for a month, and just write. It happens in November every year.

Sounds like fun.

If you're interested: http://www.nanowrimo.org/