Quest Complete: CA’s Rogue Novelists Take Over

NaNoWriMo is gone. National Novel Writing Month, the non-profit initiative that for 25 years encouraged hundreds of thousands of aspiring authors around the world to attempt to write 50,000 words of fiction during the month of November, officially shut down in early 2025 following controversy about AI tools, financial hardships, and infighting among leadership and members of the global writing community. 

But NaNoWriMo as an idea lives on at Colorado Academy, where the annual competition remains a fixture in Raether Library a decade after it first came to CA, driven by passionate students whose love for reading and writing seems unstoppable. In January 2026, longtime young-novelist advocate Becci Marzonie, Raether Library Assistant and Middle School Ceramics Instructor, resurrected the 50,000-word challenge for a CA-only month of writing and camaraderie among the current crop of Sixth through Twelfth Grade authors.

“The goal isn’t to pressure these young writers to complete a novel—very few of our participants ever do,” explains Marzonie. “It’s simply to nudge them into the habit of writing: to help them unleash their imagination, share ideas with peers, and envision themselves as full-fledged creators.”

 

The list of past global NaNoWriMo participants includes numerous well-known authors: Sara Gruen (Water for Elephants), Stephanie Perkins (Anna and the French Kiss), Erin Morgenstern (The Night Circus), Hugh Howey (Wool), and Marissa Meyer (Cinder).

At CA, the roster includes many Middle School and Upper School students who have shown up to write year after year, and even a few who have reached the “winning” 50,000-word mark, including one Sophomore who as of this year, amazingly, has now reached that milestone twice.

“I tell them it’s ‘challenge by choice,’” Marzonie explains. “If you want to reach 50,000 words, that’s great. If you just want to write with your friends and come up with cool ideas, that’s awesome, too. I’m probably a little more lenient than other organizers. For me, it’s really about giving students unstructured, creative time, without the constraints and concerns they usually encounter during the rest of their academic lives.”

 

And without the rules and timeframe once managed by the international nonprofit, NaNoWriMo—or whatever it will be eventually renamed here—may actually get better in its CA-only version. By taking on the challenge in the relatively “quiet” month of January, says Marzonie, students can more easily focus on getting their writing done than in November and December, when they are frantically trying to wind down the first half of their school year.

Bringing the month of novel writing entirely in house also means it can take on more of the flavor of CA, where veteran Upper School participants are always excited about inspiring their Middle School peers to become the next generation of Mustang Varsity Novelists.

 

“There’s a core group of writers at CA who start in Middle School and continue through Upper School. When this year’s authors heard the November contest was gone, they told me, ‘We still really want to do this!’ They’re now the ones who are mostly leading the afterschool club, making up their own rules that fit CA a little better, and encouraging their friends and classmates to share their ideas and commit to their writing.”

Bold ideas

Eighth Grade author Avery Hicks is practically a NaNoWriMo veteran, having participated all through Middle School at CA, committing tens of thousands of words to screen. This year, says Avery, “I’m starting with a storyline I created way back in June, based on an artwork that I decided to turn into a book.” A girl is trapped in a single room for the first 16 years of her life, and when she is finally rescued—by the military—she is turned into a weapon.

 

Completing around 20,000 words so far of the psychological horror story, according to Avery, “I write everything by hand first in a notebook in my room at night, and then I try to memorize as much as possible so I can type everything up the next day.”

Another veteran, Junior Leela Furgeson, is picking up where she left off after last year’s NaNoWriMo, when she wrote part of a murder mystery set in a boarding school. “This year will be a sequel, set in the same school, with two students solving the mystery.”

Tenth Grader Morgan Scyphers, a first-time author, jokes, “I’ll be happy if I can write 50,000 words by the end of my Senior year!” His fantasy story idea follows two main characters with superpowers, living in a fractured, future world. “The Earth is destroyed, and they struggle with the idea of ‘What is law? How do I carry out the law?’ It will be written from two opposite perspectives, with both sounding reasonable.”

Piper Mabrey, a Sixth Grade first-timer, already has a detailed plot in mind for her mystery/fantasy book. “It’s about a girl whose uncle has always been really weird—he goes on lots of mysterious trips. One night, she finds him sneaking around the house. But then, she meets another girl named Zoe, and one day, the two of them follow the uncle down an alleyway, and they end up in a different dimension, with unknown planets and unknown creatures.”

Two other Sixth Graders, close friends Celia Lew Young and Camille Willis-Correa, are both writing in the realistic fiction genre for their first NaNoWriMo. Celia’s story follows a family that’s attacked by mosquitoes while on a camping trip, but then meets a rock band and goes on tour. Camille’s is about “a woman who’s a cop, only she doesn’t really know how to embrace the fact that she’s a cop. Yes, she signed up for the job, but there are all these challenges that she has to face to actually become fierce enough.”

 

Tenth Grade author CJ Marshall is one of the few this year who’s braving historical fiction, looking back to World War II’s traumatic Operation Pied Piper, when the British government evacuated over 1.5 million people—mostly children—from London and other cities to live with foster families in the countryside to escape German bombing raids. “I’m thinking about telling the story from a kid’s perspective, and what that experience was actually like,” explains Marshall.

Dark themes

Indeed, trauma, horror, fantasy, and mystery are well represented among this year’s NaNoWriMo projects. 

Proud to have reached a total of 26,000 words, Seventh Grader Audrey Linsley is writing about a lost, magical island and a main character whose story encompasses themes of identity and colonization. “I did not think it was going in that direction when I planned it,” according to Audrey. “But then I did some research on the impact of colonization, and so that’s been incorporated into the story of a character having an identity crisis, who gets trapped on the island and then takes a journey with some pirates.”

 

Classmate Leven Weekes is busy imagining organized crime battles, and fellow Seventh Grader Ivy Sullivan is conjuring a haunted house inhabited by a college student who doesn’t believe in ghosts. Eighth Grader Finn Cullen is working on a screenplay—“a classic horror plot like Stranger Things”—while classmate Josephine Robinson has just begun sketching out a narrative about a girl with psychic abilities who is being hunted by the criminals who killed her father.

 

Meanwhile, Tenth Grader Nabiha Tujammul is making progress on a thriller that mixes romance and murder, and Ninth Grader Hari Shamos is thinking about a series of interconnected fantasy-supernatural horror short stories, inspired by the dark, fairytale world of Joanne Harris’s Honeycomb.

 

 

In Seventh Grader Lydie Millette’s classic murder mystery, the detective is the murderer, and fellow Seventh Grader Evelyn Toth is 15,000 words into “a steampunk-fantasy LGBTQ novel that I hope will represent a bunch of different characters and people.” In Sixth Grader Grace Morgan’s romance-tinged fantasy story, the popular girl at school turns out to have special powers and goes to an academy for kids just like her, where she meets a shy nerd with a crush. 

 

Madeline Ceriani, Grace’s classmate, is writing about a girl’s mental break after her mother’s death, while fellow Sixth Grader Silas Judson-Ojard, “a Dungeons & Dragons enthusiast,” is creating a medieval fantasy about a powerful wizard who conjures a mass plague that turns people into zombies. And Sixth Grade author Diego Rosenquist is pondering the fate of a nameless, genderless prisoner being held in an underground bunker, while a war between humans and magical beings rages outside.

 

Leave it to Ninth Grade friends Emmaline Sprick and Gracie Frazier to lighten the mood. Sprick’s book will be “a fluffy, beachy summer love triangle between a girl, a guy she meets on vacation, and then another guy she’s known all her life.” Frazier is plotting “a snowy, mountain-house kind of thing where two friends get trapped in a cabin by a storm,” and the friendship turns into something more.

Challenge accepted

Every CA NaNoWriMo participant takes the challenge very seriously (save, perhaps, for the innocent few who come to the afterschool meetings mostly for the snacks and hot chocolate supplied by Marzonie). This year, Sophomore Holly Fergason one-upped the general intensity level, successfully clocking well over 50,000 words in January, after months of journaling and planning. 

 

This isn’t the first time Fergason has completed the challenge: In Ninth Grade, she managed 53,000 words, after the Senior leader of the Upper School Creative Writing Club, Gianna Lish ’25, encouraged her to give NaNoWriMo a try. Though she borrowed heavily from some of her favorite fantasy novels for that effort, she admits, “It was a really good first project; it was mostly just to practice writing.” 

The thrill of the challenge stuck with her, and this year, Fergason recounts, “I filled an entire notebook with background characters and countries that aren’t even mentioned in the story.” Sticky notes took over her bedroom walls, precisely laying out the geography of the world she wanted to build, the diverse cultures that populate it, references to myths and folktales, and even made-up names and words generated by Finnish and Russian online language translators.

“I started completely from scratch this time, with a much more structured writing system. I definitely got into the world-building side of writing.” 

 

Fergason’s fantasy novel, Broken Crowns, presents a dual-sided narrative of war, “a Romeo-and-Juliet kind of conflict where the reason they’re fighting is buried in history, and they slowly realize that they don’t know why they’re enemies at all.” Struggles with love and loss, corruption, and conflicting ideas of government run throughout the book, and ultimately the epic reflects the idea that there are no “good guys” in such a battle.

The seed of the novel, she says, first took root in October, in the form of a drawing that was little more than a doodle. “I decided to make a map one day. There’s this technique where you scatter rice across paper, and then you trace out where the rice lands to create basic boundaries and geography.”

Pondering the rough sketch, Fergason found herself noticing what looked like a mountain range, “and a mountain range is an excellent natural defense system,” she says. “What if two societies are at war? Everything sort of grew from that.”

An experienced Dungeon Master who regularly leads her extended family on carefully planned Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, Fergason had no problem expanding her novel concept into a fully-fledged universe. “It was definitely a big form of escapism,” she notes. 

Sitting down for an hour and a half each night to write, Fergason recounts, “It was great to have this little world you could go into after a long day. I put my headphones on, and I can’t tell you how many movie soundtracks I listened to that month while writing.”

 

Yet being inspired and supported by a group of fellow authors at CA was essential to the creative process.

“This is just a great environment to be doing something like NaNoWriMo,” she explains. Even with the welcome push from Lish, Fergason says, “I knew I couldn’t write a novel if I didn’t have people at CA to talk to about it. Everyone is so excited about your ideas, and everyone wants to hear about your plot and talk about your plot—even my teachers. It’s so much fun when your English or Chemistry teacher is interested in the back story, or your history teacher says your narrative sounds like a real political revolution that actually happened.”

Prize winner

Still, despite her surpassing the 50,000-word milestone with the backing of a uniquely supportive creative community, the work goes on: Fergason continues editing and filling out parts of her book, and once it’s “finished,” she’ll send it to an author she met—a connection that’s the result of yet another CA-only moment.

A group of Upper School students, selected based on written submissions and led by English Instructor Dr. Jon Vogels, attends the festival of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature at the University of Oklahoma every fall. In addition to experiencing the award ceremonies and meeting other young writers, they are invited to a special dinner with the winning authors. 

As one of this year’s attendees, Fergason got to speak with the latest recipient of the renowned NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s and Young Adult Literature, Cherie Dimaline—the Indigenous Canadian speculative fiction author of The Marrow Thieves who is known for supporting deserving young writers—and was overjoyed when Dimaline liked what she told her about Broken Crowns during a dinner conversation. 

Indeed, Dimaline liked it so much that she invited Fergason to send her the completed manuscript so she could help her find a publisher.

“At CA, I have really found the space and opportunities to explore my academic and creative sides,” Fergason says—and perhaps even the chance to see her work shepherded into print by an international literary figure. 

A newcomer to CA in Ninth Grade, she adds, “It was amazing for me to come here and meet all these students who are engaging in class, asking questions, telling you about their ideas, and just passionate about actually being students. And it’s the same with all my CA teachers: They love being here.”

 

Marzonie—teacher, librarian, and cheerleader for young writers—says, “I remember as a kid, essays and papers were so scary to me. If I had had the opportunity to practice writing on a daily basis and just get in the habit of it, I feel like it would have been less scary. That’s really my whole goal with this group: to not think about it too much, overcome that ‘inner saboteur,’ and just get your good ideas down on paper.”

A postscript

At the February lunch Marzonie planned as the wrapup for this year’s competition, another two-time NaNoWriMo finisher, Senior Kit Freeman, joins the group to enjoy takeout from Noodles & Co., reflect on writing at CA, and offer a few words of advice gleaned from six years of participating in the challenge.

 

“I’m a stream-of-consciousness writer, which essentially means that I block out two hours, and I sit down and write 1,500 words give or take—or more, if I’m really in the zone,” according to Freeman. “I’m a big believer that once you start, you just keep going. Do your homework early, then sit down and just do it.”

 

When a first-time participant asks about planning, Freeman replies, “I used to be what in NaNoWriMo was called a ‘pantser,’ meaning you write from the seat of your pants. But I’ve become much more of a planner over time.”

And what if a writer is only getting started? 

“Your first years in NaNoWriMo are really just about getting a lot on the page and figuring out your style—what you like, what you’re good at—and then after that it becomes more about ‘How deep is my world?’”

 

But, advises Freeman, “The one thing I caution you against is planning too much: You’re likely to burn out or end up hating your story. Plan just as much as brings you joy, and don’t go past that point.”

As the group wraps up their final meeting, Freeman tells them, “One day, I’d love to be published. But for right now, this is me following the advice that all the great writers give: Just write. Have fun. Perfect your skills, work on your craft, and do it with a group of people that you enjoy. This is my ‘Just write.’”