Never underestimate the power of the NaNo forums, or subreddits, or general forums that open a NaNo board. It's not just about pacing, it's about communication.
Online forums are great, but I wonder if they're missing something nevertheless for lack of physicality.
One of the more interesting papers I read last year was "Knitting Community: Human and Social Capital in the Early Transition into Entrepreneurship", Kim 2018 https://goo.gl/1AfwZG on knitting enthusiasts on the Ravelry knitting forums https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravelry - despite being eminently digitizable, participation in offline knitting circles still appeared to be a big predictor of knitting success & innovation.
