Thirty days.One novel.

It was a round number picked by a small group of friends in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1999, and it stuck because it turned out to be the right size of impossible. Twenty-one people took part in that first November. The figure was chosen to be about the length of a short novel — The Great Gatsby is the book usually named as the benchmark, at somewhere around 47,000 words — rather than derived from anything about how fast a person can write.

National Novel Writing Month grew from that into an organisation with a website, a word-count tracker, regional volunteers and several hundred thousand participants a year. The organisation announced it was shutting down in 2025. The number outlived it, which is the part worth noticing: people kept doing November without anywhere official to log it.

Nothing here is affiliated with that organisation. 50,000 is the default on this page because it is the number the hobby settled on, and the field above is editable because it was always an arbitrary one.

1,667 words a day, every day, for thirty days. That is the number on every chart, and it is the number this tracker starts from. How long that takes is not a figure anyone can give you honestly: writing speed varies far more between people than it varies between days, and the same person will spend forty minutes on it one evening and three hours on it the next.

The trap in 1,667 is that it is an average, and averages are reassuring in a way the arithmetic is not. Miss one day and the remaining target goes to 1,724. Miss three and it is 1,852. Miss the first week entirely and you are looking at 2,174 a day for the twenty-three days that are left — which is not catastrophic, but it is a different activity from the one you signed up for, and finding that out on day eight is much better than finding it out on day twenty.

That is the whole reason the number at the top of this page is "a day from here" rather than "a day". A fixed daily target stops being true the first time you skip, and a tracker that keeps showing you 1,667 after you have missed four days is telling you something comforting and false.

Week two has a reputation and it earns it. Nothing has gone wrong by then — that is precisely the problem. The opening you had been thinking about for months is written. The novelty of getting up early has worn off. You are somewhere around 15,000 words in, which is a great deal of work and about a third of the way, and the end is still a fortnight of evenings away.

There is no trick here, but there are two things the arithmetic can tell you that morale cannot. The first is that being behind in week two is cheap. Two thousand words down on day twelve is about a hundred and ten extra words a day across the eighteen that are left, which is nothing. The same gap on day twenty-five is four hundred a day, which is real. The chart above exists to make that difference visible while it is still the cheap kind.

The second is that the projection line is usually kinder than the feeling. People who are behind tend to assume they are further behind than they are, because what they remember is the missed days rather than the good ones. A date is harder to argue with than a mood.

Read the projection under the chart before deciding. It takes your average so far and runs it forward, and it will tell you a date. If that date is in the first week of December, you are three or four hundred words a day from a November finish, which is one extra half-hour. If it is in February, it is not a pace problem and no amount of tracking will make it one.

Two adjustments are worth more than any amount of pushing. Move the goal, which is what the field at the top is for — 30,000 words finished is a considerably better outcome than 50,000 words abandoned on day nineteen, and there is nobody to tell about it either way. Or write the gap on one day rather than spreading it: a single long Saturday closes a four-day hole more reliably than the three weeks it would actually take at 1.2 times the usual, because 1.2 times the usual feels like every day being slightly worse.

The one thing worth not doing is recounting. A day spent working out exactly where you stand is a day of not writing, and the number was never the point.

It is at the short end, and it is in good company there. The word counts usually cited for published novels are approximations rather than anything the publishers announce, but the shape of the list is not in doubt: Of Mice and Men comes in around 30,000, The Great Gatsby around 47,000, Fahrenheit 451 around 46,000, Slaughterhouse-Five around 49,000. A contemporary adult novel submitted to a publisher is more often 80,000 to 100,000, and a first-time author writing in most genres is generally advised to land in that range.

So 50,000 words in November is a complete short novel, or a substantial and very rough two-thirds of a conventional one. Both are real outcomes. Neither is a finished book — what a month of this produces is a draft that exists, which is the only kind that can be revised.

It counts what you tell it. There is no document to connect, no plugin, no folder to watch — you type a number and it goes into a day. That is a deliberate limit rather than an unfinished feature: anything that reads your manuscript needs either an upload or an account, and this page is built to need neither.

The number you type can mean two things, and the toggle above the box decides which. + words today adds to whatever is already logged for today, which is how people actually talk about it. = total now treats the number as the length of the whole manuscript — the figure your word processor shows you — and works out what today's share of it must be. The second one is the one that survives forgetting to log for three days, because a running total does not care when you last looked at it.

Any day can be corrected. Tap a day on the calendar and type over it, including days you left empty at the time. The chart, the pace and the projection all follow from those thirty numbers and nothing else.

Because there is nothing here that needs one. A goal and thirty integers fit in your own browser, and the moment a page asks for an email address it acquires an account system, a password reset, a database with your writing habits in it and a reason to send you messages in December.

The cost of that choice is real and is worth stating plainly: what is stored here lives in this browser on this device, so it does not follow you to your phone, and clearing your browsing data clears it. That is what the backup button is for. It writes a small file you keep, and the restore button reads it back — on this machine or any other.

Nothing you type is sent anywhere. There is no analytics event carrying your word count, no server that has ever seen it, and no account for it to be attached to. The privacy page covers the whole site; this paragraph is the part specific to this tool.