Well, if you don’t follow these things, or if you aren’t intent on writing your own heartbreaking-work-of-staggering-genius masterpiece, you may not be aware of the implosion of the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) organization.
NaNoWriMo has been an annual challenge to writers everywhere to sit down and write fifty thousand (50,000) words during the month of November. Thousands took up the challenge each year and wrote (or started) their novel. Many did it just to say they did it. Others because they felt they had to get that story out of them before they died. Still others did it so they could publish their stories. My own novel, Arthur Mace, Medieval Gumshoe, started as a NaNoWriMo project. They had Municipal Liaisons who hosted local writing meet-ups, where participants would gather and work on their stories together. There were active and lively forums where people talked about everything from their writing hopes and dreams to their cats.
So, why is the organization collapsing?
Well, it started last year when there was a scandal over one of the Municipal Liaisons at a local meetup molesting a child. The official response from the NaNoWriMo organization was lackluster at best and the writing community got up in arms that they didn’t do more to try to handle the situation better.
The Municipal Liaisons, who are all unpaid volunteers, by the way, started getting treated horribly by the organization. Communication breakdowns compounded the problems.
And now, the writing community is ready to lynch the Powers That Be over a stance taken by the NaNoWriMo head honchos that writing your 50,000 words for the month of November using A.I., like ChatGPT or Claude, is not only acceptable but encouraged.
As a result of all this, NaNoWriMo is collapsing and many are pulling away from it.
I rather liked NaNoWriMo. I liked that challenge of trying to get your daily word count written and getting into a writing habit. That was pretty much the intention of NaNoWriMo when it started – a way to get people into a habit of writing daily.
Even though NaNoWriMo is falling apart, I think I’ll carry on in the spirit of the challenge. I’ve got a head full of stories that want out of my head so this might be a way to produce more of them. I’ll just have my own 50K Word Month-Long Challenge.
I bring all this up now because October is usually called ‘Preptober’ by all those participation in the November challenge. The spirit of the challenge is that you don’t actually write any of your 50K words before November 1. Planning on the other hand, jotting down notes, characters, back stories, world histories, etc. is totally encouraged. So many participants work throughout the month of October to get ready to write in November.
I usually tried to ‘pants’ my way through NaNoWriMo each year. “Pantsing’, or ‘writing by the seat of your pants’ means you sit down on November 1, and just start writing. I’d have a vague idea of my plot or characters and hope that the story would work itself out as I went along. The alternative is being a ‘plotter’, someone who plots out their entire story and character histories before writing word one. Being a ‘pantser’ never worked out well for me, so this year I’m going to try take advantage of Preptober and try to do some prep work on my story before writing it.
So, my Hordeling, do you have any writing aspirations? If so, you might want to think about joining me for the 50K Word Month-Long Challenge. You’ve got some time to work on planning out your story before it gets going. Just consider this a ‘heads up’.
If you’d like to support my efforts, why not buy me a chocolate chip cookie through my Ko-Fi page? https://ko-fi.com/jhusum