#NaNoWriMo 2019

[authormarialberg]

Decorating for the Halloween Party

[writeouswriter]

One of the problems with Nanowrimo being in November is almost all my WIPs are spooky Halloween paranormal horror summer autumn whatever themed and the second October ends, I’m suddenly possessed by only the ability to think about the Happy Holiday Special and not the actual project I want to work on

[storybook-souls]

total wordcount for the year is 122,758. kind of based.

[captainadwen]

Trick or treat! 👀🎃

🍬🍬🍭🍭

I'm still on nano brainrot but I went searching for my old ideas for the superhero thing, the only one with like... any planning done...!

And it is very weeby. So weeby. It's so funny.

In the funniest version of brainstorming:

The city is described as "FF7 Midgar-esque". One character used qi to manipulate their powers, but the other one used... "materia stones"

(I am not sure if you have played ff7, but they used these small spheres called materia to do magic)

The city is powered by "power stones " which are similar / same source as materia stones. This is followed by the baffling conclusion: "basically nuclear energy".

Yeah past me. Please explain how artificial qi is the same as power stones is the same as materia stones is the same as nuclear energy

I'm having lots of fun

[halo-eater]

I think awsten knight is kinda annoying and needs to get off Twitter and that the stuff he's been making lately is kinda bad and yet I still have a signed poster of him hanging in my apartment 😭

[digitalcockroach]

developing a new story idea hmmm 👀

[inkfox]

constantly torn between the desire to force all my friends to read my notes and give me their opinions about my story/characters vs. the desire to keep my brain rot all to myself for no one else in this world to see

[magellanicpenguin]

it's done

i can return to my regularly scheduled bullshit

without having to write 1670 words every day

COS I DID IT BITCH!! 50K!!! YEEHAW!!!

[authormarialberg]

Not All Monsters Are Villains

Plotting by Maria L. Berg 2023 If you missed this morning’s prompts post, I am responding to the prompts from What Makes a Villain. For today’s images I revisited the classic monster transparencies I created at the beginning of the month. Thinking about the difference between monsters and villains, I realized I would only consider some of the monsters villains—the ones who chose to act…

[bugcatcherwill]

Me during nanowrimo

[picklesinabottle]

Fake nanowrimo where I just write a couple words of fanfic every day because if I don't eventually get all my ideas down in a cohesive piece of writing I will explode

[airplanned]

Frequently Asked Questions from the last two days:

There have been a lot of questions shot my way lately, and I'm a little overwhelmed. Sorry if I've missed anything.

Recurring things:

"I was going to do NaNo this year, but now I guess I won't!" NO! Writing is great! Just don't use their website! There are other online trackers if you don't feel like using excel. There are other online writing communities. I recommend 4theWords. I recommend finding out what your former ML is doing or asking your local library/bookstore if they're hosting anything.

"I didn't know there was an organization. What did they even do?" They had a website that tracked your progress and hosted an online forum of writers also doing NaNo. They also hosted the Young Writer's Program, which mostly ran out of schools and had more direction than the adult version. They also supported the MLs, who hosted in person write-ins, kick off parties, and occasionally a pot luck Thanksgiving dinner. Also, the sponsors of NaNoWriMo would often give discounts to winners. This is how everyone I know in real life affords Scrivner.

"Why is this time stamped from July?" A NaNoWriMo timeline of events: In 2023, there was a grooming scandal. It was ignored for months and then handled poorly. Later that year (*correction: it was in 2024), in response to the grooming scandal, they offered the MLs (Municipal Liaisons) new contracts that required them to moderate their regional forums, accept all liability for behavior at their in-person write-ins and their regional forums, and threw in an anti-defamation clause for good measure. In July of 2024, they posted on tumblr about "Ethical Ways to use AI." My screenshots result from that debacle. In September, they put out their official AI policy, and here we are.

"Why are you canceling them now and not over the grooming scandal?" My history with NaNoWriMo: I started doing NaNo in 2009. I stopped using the site in 2019, when the website was so glitchy that it wouldn't keep track of my word count, but I kept doing the challenge without them. I deleted my account in 2023 when the ML scandal broke. I forgot to unfollow them on Tumblr, because they don't post much. When I saw their July AI post, I commented "Boooo!" and unfollowed them. They promptly slid into my DMs.

[oathena11-writes]

DO NOT PARTICIPATE IN NANOWRIMO

Time to talk about something I haven’t really talked about before.

Nanowrimo. You know the challenge to write 50k in a month? That starts in November, and usually people start coming out of hibernation to start planning for that now.

And to plan, they often find their way to the forums to find others who are gearing up and thinking about turning October into Preptober.

Only… the forums are closed this year. Why is that?

Well… https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSYcdosGLoPFI_Dc--vuC9Bl4-OUFGcmHgBRt2aHSRVWBPc6su4AMFY5iDgZGyC379Zm8C7zhBd2zuf/pub

Wait sorry that’s a long document though as someone who has been keeping up with this since late October 2023 and knows a lot about what’s going on, this is the most accurate summary I know of offhand.

So… short version? NaNo has been crumbling for a while, between dismissing people’s dislike of the 2019 redesign, not handling conflict well in general, leaving MLs feeling unsupported and unappreciated, and allowing a culture to grow in which a forum mod became the sole moderator of a fast moving teen forum.

This forum mod was accused of grooming. Several people compiled evidence to show why they believed that. The staff at NaNo did nothing. They claimed an investigation happened but no action was taken for months.

I read through a thread where many concerns were discussed and barely listened to. I watched many members of the community went from hopeful and believing in the organization to angry and disheartened over the course of several months after being treated like children, being told things would happen that never did change.

Then things came to a boiling point in November, and the Board got involved. They shut down the forums and started investigating. We had hope. Then they started treating us the same way the staff had.

There are currently no known MLs as all were removed before April, as they need to be vetted and go through some training, only there’s no word on when that is going to happen.

There were barely any proper events during April and July, and some events NaNo advertised were hosted by their sponsors.

There’s a lot more that I could get into, but I think the more I try to explain the more likely I am to get it wrong and there is enough misinformation about this controversy out there.

For now, the latest is this post on zen desk about AI.

Yeah… I have no faith left. Do not even look at NaNo’s official site. They don’t deserve to think they’re getting people to participate. Especially since all they want is money these days.

If you’re looking for a substitute word tracker, I highly recommend trackbear.app. It’s still in beta, but I’ve been using it all year, and I enjoy it. There’s a goals option that includes the graph and par line we all enjoyed with NaNo, and there’s leaderboards to have fun with your friends.

[duckprintspress]

I know almost nothing about NaNoWriMo but I would love to hear what you mean about "the last five years". What have they don't in the last years (before this current bullshit) to make the experience worse than before?

Hey!

So, I first heard about NaNoWriMo in like...2005? 2006?...and made my own first attempt in 2012, so I've been around for a while.

For me personally, three major things stand out as being issues:

In 2019, NaNo rolled out a new webpage, consolidating what had once been two different webpages - the main NaNo page and the Camp NaNo page. This roll out was, to put it gently, a fucking disaster, and broke much of the website, and at least for me made it nigh-unusable. It also nerfed the forums.

Late last year, grooming allegations came out against moderators and staff. You can read more about it here. I never looked into it much, and it was very difficult to tell what actually happened with the backlash - what was proven, etc. - and I just don't know much about it, but it certainly made me extremely wary.

And the current nonsense, which it sounds like you're aware of.

I've also known multiple regional coordinators (ML = Municipal Liaisons) and while they've not shared specifics and even if they had, I wouldn't feel at liberty to share what was shared with me, the general consensus is that the treatment of the volunteer MLs has gotten progressively worse, and the forums and boards increasingly unusable, to the extent that a lot of people I know have "broken off" their regions - my home region, for example, operates a writer group, founded originally through NaNo, now completely separate from NaNo because NaNo fucked up just that bad. Like I said, I don't know the details, but I trust my friends that if they say it was untenable, it was untenable.

All in all, since the website merge, they've made it clear they don't care about the feedback they receive, seemed to almost be going out of their way to damage the community-building aspects of the webpage that were always one of the most valuable parts of the experience, and just generally haven't managed things like the scandal in #2 well.

Honestly, I basically stopped using NaNo after the merge. I managed, I think, two more years after that (not winning NaNo, but I won a couple Camp NaNos with my own word count goal in, like, 2019 and 2020).

The reason the current issues have prompted me to delete is that, once upon a time, it was required to enter typed text to "validate" a word count. I have no idea if NaNo retained that text in anyway, nor do I have any idea what the terms of NaNo's agreement with ProWritingAid is. All I know that even the possibility that they've got my data stored, even the chance that they might use my words to train PWA's LLM, is enough for me to go from "I no longer use this or wish to us this" to "I am immediately deleting."

Hopefully, deleting actually removes my data. I wasn't able to take the time to read their updated ToS enough to actually be sure. But it's the one thing in my power to do, so I did it.

Sorry I don't have more detail to make rubbernecking the drama more fun, lol. :D

-unforth

[cdelphiki]

I want to participate in nanowrimo this year but can’t decide what to do. What would you guys want to see from me? Can’t promise I’ll stick with the winner but I’m interested to know what my readers are most looking forward to.

I would write through November, most likely in first draft stage then start posting polished pieces later in Nov and into December and beyond. This is how I wrote the first 60k-ish words of Jason and the Three Terrors back in 2019. I’ve been writing more lately but it hasn’t been on things that are ready to publish. I’m trying to avoid starting new long-fics when I have a handful not complete.

[stoportotouch]

this all started, in case you didn't know, because two years ago nanowrimo had a mildly dodgy sponsor. (and in 2019 they chose a poor hosting service for their new forums.) and because they continued to double down on that sponsor being Perfect And Flawless and not a scam their entire organisation has come crashing down around their ears.