#anti nanowrimo

[meluiloth]

Since the whole thing with NaNoWriMo has gone down, I've noticed that one of their former sponsors, Ellipsus, has cut contact with NaNoWriMo because they do not support their stance on AI; I didn't know what Ellipsus was, but upon further research I've found that they are a writing platform that works a lot like Google Docs and Microsoft Word, only with a heavier leaning on the story-writing aspect and connecting with other writers - and they also completely denounce any use of AI, both in the writing process itself and in the use of their platform. I really appreciate that.

Since this is the case (and since I've noticed Google has begun implementing more AI into their software), I've decided to give Ellipsus a try to see if it's a good alternative to Google Docs (my main writing platform). It's completely free and so far, I've found it simple to use (although it is pretty minimal in its features), and I really like the look of it.

I figured I'd spread the word about this platform in case any of you writers would want to give it a try, and if you do, let me know how you like it!

[therkalexander]

Fuck NaNoWriMo.

If you don’t want to put the time and energy into honing your writing, then do something the fuck else. Leaning on a plagiarism machine that churns out gobbledygook and heats up the planet ain’t it.

[did-i-do-this-write]

Finally got around to deleting my Nano account even though I haven't used it in years (it's the principle of the thing)

But i also wanted to highlight that I spent like 6 hours yesterday switching all of my documents and stories over to a hard drive and then switching my main writing platform to Ellipsus.

It's very similar to Google docs, I personally love the formatting because it works perfectly for how my brain works, and they are constantly making updates with a steadfast Anti-AI stance. I just felt so much better after switching. Wanted to share.

[almightytuba]

so in general im not mad about fucknanowrimo coming back strong. i am very glad, actually. ai is disgusting BUT if youre purposely not taking this as an opportunity to acknowledge and also rage about it promoting suicide, pedophilia, racism, terrorism, and fucking grooming kids when it is a SCHOOL ACCEPTED PROGRAM reevaluate yourself. please.

[shadelorde]

we (the ywp users) MADE the ‘anti nanowrimo’ tag. we were the ones who really used it. but guess no one cares until it’s about a hot button issue that everyone can jump in on and not “ew icky grooming makes me uncomfortable :( “

[shifting-shadows-writes]

what about us.

so many posts about the ai thing and i have seen a single post from someone i don't know about the abuse we faced.

what about us?

[luckystarchild]

Obviously since formal NaNoWriMo participation is no longer on the table, my November will now feature the grocery-store generic brand version of writing 50k in 30 days.

"50kin30Days" is now the challenge name for me. Or abbreviated, "50n30."

"This November I'm doing 50n30." Boom. Cut. Print.

[jaydove-writes]

Due to NaNoWriMo's support for AI, I propose a new challenge with a new name: Novelember. Who's with me? I chose the name because it's a combination of novel and November.

[frosti-moon]

Decided to delete my nanowrimo account because of their pro-AI stance, and...

You're account

YOU'RE account

YOU ARE ACCOUNT

I can see why they're pro-AI now these mfs can't even tell the difference between your and you're

[if-we-are-free-tell-me-why]

I've tried to use AI for writing because some dude in one of my seminars claimed Chat Gpt was a great way for just brainstorming on your own (very much a tech bro) and I was in a really bad writing slump, still am to a degree so I thought what the hell why not at least try.

And did you catch that I said I'm still in this slump? Yeah because it turns out AI is not better at helping you brainstorm than an empty piece of paper. The ideas in your head are already so much more original than anything you could achieve with AI I promise, like even if AI didn't rely on tons of stolen data even if the moral case wasn't as clear as it is, it would be a bad method in a sea of other really great methods to get your writing started like..idk..interacting with other artists. The thing that kept me going was reading, watching TV listening to music and getting inspired like that, analysing other stuff, figuring out why things make me feel like this and how they are structured. It's more fun like that and you don't get everything you already know spat at you in a numbered list.

I'm still slow as fuck when it comes to writing, I might never write as prolifically as I did when I was younger or hell maybe I will, but AI will not help on this journey, not just because it's soulless or immoral but also because it's fucking useless

[full-of-malice]

Is it bad that I still miss the YWP. I left the community behind a while ago and I’m doing fine now but sometimes I wish i could just live in the summer where I was ignorant. And I always feel bad about it. Idk.

i get it honestly. you don't need to feel guilty about wishing what you could have you know?

just like a lot of places, it wasn't bad every single moment, and there were close friends and bonds that made you want to stick around through all the bad times and repeating conflicts.

i think it's just really important to remember that what made the ywp so special was the people there. any part of happiness or help that i gained from that website was never because of the moderation or the staff or anything to do with the shitty website format, it was always the people who knew how bad nano was but they were sticking around. towards the end a lot of people stuck around or came out of the works to protect the people who had nowhere else to go. and think that's important.

nano was never any good, the ywp was shit, but it was the people that really made it feel so special when it did.

i distanced myself from the ywp a lot in the months after it was shut down and once i was apart from it i realized how toxic it all was even when doing our bests to separate ourselves from the worsts of nano. and how dependent i was on the place. and then afterwards being apart of the writing server that only harbored some of the most toxic parts and mentalities of nano was not any better. i was forced along with a few others to come to terms with the fact for our sake we had to distance ourselves from that too. in the end we shut it down

but it changed me as a person, i don't think i would be who i am today, for better or worse. through whatever methods it forced me to grow and adapt, and better understand myself. but i certainly wish i could have met everyone somewhere else. in a different time and a different place.

if you ever need it my dms are always open, i'm on a few different platforms as well if you want to talk, feel free to just ask for them. and if you are ever trying to get back into contact with anyone specific from the ywp, i know a good chunk of them and how to contact them, so feel free to reach out and i'll do my best

[atendencytotangle]

Why I Won't Be Participating in NaNoWriMo Again

Here's a blog post about my thoughts on the recent NaNoWriMo Statement on Artificial Intelligence.

(note: the above featured image is taken from the NaNoWriMo Statement on Artificial Intelligence and does not reflect my views) I tend not to bring the dramas of the writing and publishing community onto this blog because it’s more of my space to talk about my goals and accomplishments. Also, I tend to try to steer clear of any drama because I find it upsets my creative equilibrium. but seeing…

[heartreactor]

Guys, guys, guys.... you know... you can keep track of words with just one pencil and a spreadsheet

[k--havok]

Honestly I’ve been thinking on this for a while but I really wish NaNoWriMo wasn’t in November

There are SO many careers/jobs that have October-December be the busy season, or students having to study for end-of-semester exams, and pairing that with upcoming holidays, it’s just not feasible for a lot of people.

And yes there is camp nanowrimo during April and July but let’s be real; not nearly as many people participate during these and there’s a vibe of people looking down upon camp when it occurs.

Idk it’s just frustrating.

[shifting-shadows-writes]

hi. i'm back.

to my lovely lovely friends, i am so sorry for abandoning y'all. especially @sorrowlovingbirds i hope you are doing alright and i would love to stay in contact with you.

it's almost november again and i'm finally in a good spot to share a bit about what has happened in the past year and honestly before that too.

i'm putting this below a cut. this is long and chaotic and i'm really sorry that this is my returning post to tumblr and my little ywp community but i owe y'all an explanation, and i'm hoping i can speak out now about what i experienced.

this is my turn to step forward about the nano drama of last year, and my apology letter to any friends i've worried.

(tw the nanodrama, mental health spirals, toxic/abusive friendships, bigotry and threats)

for any of y'all who see this post and don't know me, my name is shadows. my first foray into the online world was the nanowrimo young writers program forums.

i'm sure many of y'all have heard about the abuse and trauma many of us have faced, and if you haven't, my friends have plenty of posts about it.

i joined the forums in april of 2020. i was lonely and isolated and the community there helped me figure myself out.

i wasn't particularly active most of the time. i had a few friends. people i knew and liked drifted in and out, and i had no way to contact them.

i ended up in a toxic friendship with someone on nano and it took a year to cut that off. i was going through my own separate mental health shit at the time so i didn't really realize how bad that person was for me for a while.

that was the first time i really learned people on nano and the internet weren't always who they said they were. i had learned internet safety and i kept my own life fairly private, but it didn't occur to me that other people who didn't keep their lives private could lie about the details.

at some point i joined the ywp discord server, moderated by basically the popular kids of the forums. (i hope y'all don't mind that i say this; it's how i viewed it.)

i learned other kids had been going through some of the same stuff i had--bullying, grooming, etc and had received little to no support from the moderators for it.

collectively we had a very jaded view of nano, but i think we all felt it was our duty to protect other younger users. (this led many members of this server to spiral in mental health because they had to deal with all the drama.)

but things were okay ish for me. i had recovered and i was pretty active on both the nano forums and the discord server.

then october 7, 2023 happened. (it will become very clear why this is relevant soon.)

i am not a politically involved person. i know a little between history class and what my parents have explained to me, but political dynamics always confused me and upset me so i generally avoided things.

being a jewish kid, i had a vague understanding of israeli history. i knew it existed and how old it was and i could recognize it on a map. i knew there was an ongoing war and that it was complicated. i knew the idf had mandatory service from my israeli camp counselors (most of whom had served roles other than active fighters) and i was confused that people would attack gal gadot for having served when it's mandatory. but that was it. my working knowledge of israel was basically nonexistent.

and all of a sudden, i was expected to know everything.

nano had a lot of jewish kids, all of whom seemed to know way more than i did. i got most of my information from them, and from my parents. (a little from school.)

in theory, i'd had lessons on the history of zionism and different branches of what zionism agreed with, i'd read israeli founding documents, i'd had a brief history of the conflict explained to me.

in practice, i hadn't paid attention to any of that. i didn't know what was going on, but i knew that i was expected to. i also didn't trust non-jews to give me information, in part due to a specific incident on nano which happened a few weeks later.

on october 13 somewhere in my community was targeted with a bomb threat. i told my friends on nano about it because it was scary and i wanted support. they gave it to me.

i also ended up writing and posting a brief overview of antisemitism (using knowledge i'd gathered from hebrew school and the internet for fact checking). here is the link to that if anyone wants to read it. the wording was last updated in december 2023.

it was pretty common practice on the nano forums to write a psa about something you'd noticed or that had affected you recently, and i had several other people say they would like a psa on antisemitic tropes and dogwhistles.

not long after i posted that, someone in a "diverse character help" thread asked for help writing a palestinian character. i will call them eva as that was part of their username and i need to refer to them.

one of my friends who is from northern israel responded with a bit of basic background information.

the response eva provided did not seem to line up with anything my friend had said. i was already wary of a non-jewish non-palestinian person writing a story about israeli/palestinian dynamics as that is incredibly complex, and i could tell eva was not well informed.

so i responded to the thread, warning eva that this was a sensitive and complicated topic and as a jew i felt someone israeli or palestinian should be writing this book. if eva isn't from israel like my friend is, maybe don't write a main character from the area. let actual palestinians tell their stories.

(unfortunately, i do not have my exact wording, though i did save their posts. i will be paraphrasing my responses to the best of my ability; i will paraphrase eva's and pull relevant quotes.)

eva responded to my message by saying: "Im not from PALESTINE, but I am VERY familiar with the topic" (even though they didn't seem to be).

they continued: "I want to inform people about the TRUTH. [...] Maybe you should try doing more research as to what is ACTUALLY happening, not what the internet and social networks have been lying to you about."

a reminder here that i had not mentioned anything more than: leave talking about palestinian trauma to palestinians. not what "side" i took (it is so much more complicated than that).

they continued to accuse me of not having a heart or having a bit of human in myself.

my antisemitism dogwhistle alert was blaring. i had just spent a week writing that psa, and here were real life examples of exactly the tropes i had been talking about!

but i kept my cool. mostly. i held a hope they could be reasoned with. "don't write this, please. you do not know what you're talking about. i think your perception of the conflict is just going to hurt people."

i need to include most of their next post.

"Netanyahu even said he will not stop bombing, killing and torturing Palestinians. The media has really gotten to you. Even some Jews are on the side of the truth, because they know, killing thousands of innocent civilians is wrong. Are you going to ignore the protests that are going on, because HUMANS actually care? You don't have to be Muslim to support the ones who are oppressed. I hope God puts you in the same situation as the Palestinians are going through right now. And I hope that you get to experience that. Does it really not hurt you to see kids bombed into pieces, getting Phosphoric Acid on you? Have YOU ever talked to a Palestinian because I have. You are blind as to what is going on. And don't come at me saying, "WeLl WhAt AbOuT hAmAs? At least they know who to challenge. You evacuated from Germany because of Hitler, and now you're doing the same. Netanyahu is Hitler in disguise. Beheading babies! Is that normal to you? If so, I hope you figure out what is right and what is wrong, and not being influenced by the media."

this whole paragraph was full of antisemitism accusing jews of being inhuman and controlling the media. and accusing me of being inhuman and unable to tell right from wrong.

the kicker is that i mentioned zero politics. i did not mention netanyahu or how i feel about him. i did not mention hamas or how i feel about them.

but what really got me was this: "I hope God puts you in the same situation as the Palestinians are going through right now. And I hope that you get to experience that. Does it really not hurt you to see kids bombed into pieces"

i had received an active bomb threat about a week beforehand. i didn't need to imagine going through that--i very nearly had.

i couldn't respond. i knew i would respond poorly and i would say something i didn't mean.

luckily, my friend stepped in once again and agreed with me, telling eva to stop and that they were misinformed. my friend, having lived in israel, had more knowledge of the active situation than me and tried to explain this to eva.

and eva responded with this:

"At least YOU actually have some knowledge but not enough. I will not say any more because I don't want to waste my precious words on you guys. [...] But, at the end, false knowledge doesn't work on me. Israelis and Jews are different, as I've heard and seen from different Jews myself."

if someone who lived in the area doesn't have enough knowledge, who does?

this rant is cut down because after saying they "don't want to waste [their] precious words" on us, they continued to accuse us of being immoral, uninformed, and duped by the media.

then finally: "israelis and jews are different." what? does the media controlling immoral inhuman stereotype only apply to israelis? are half of the world's jews different from the other half?

more of the same conversation happened. other users stepped in defending me from a literal bomb threat and the accusation that jews or israelis or "the media" or whatever else were corrupt, immoral, and inhuman.

the whole thread was removed, though some people asked for my original response (leave these stories to people who have actually experienced it) to stay up, as it was an important point.

this was one of many frustrating moderation decisions made recently on the site, and one of many where a mod stepped in only when things got wildly out of hand. (not to mention the speed of moderation response suggested the mod had been active while that conversation had been ongoing.

it was also one of the last straws for us. just a few days later, we posted about what we had faced on the ywp site to the main forums.

y'all can find what happened next on my friends' accounts. there was drama and investigations and a ton more stuff we didn't even know about.

i was glad we had kept receipts from all the times we had felt hurt. we had evidence that we were being mistreated, and the adults on the main site rallied to our side.

it turns out the main staff didn't even know the teens had a separate forum space on our own website.

the forums were shut down. i don't know if i was relieved or upset. there was a lot of community and collaborative work and safe space for so many kids out there. i know many kids from abusive families who got away with having the social media of a writing forum and found friends and explored their identities. and at the same time we faced so much shit on that site.

the discord server continued though it turned into much the same problems as the site. there were cliques and constant gossip and now it wasn't even moderated by adults but by involved teenagers.

by febuary i was stressed. it had been a rough few months for a lot of reasons, and i had happened to have a particularly bad day with people getting mad at me that i vented about. even though i put it under spoiler marks and tagged it, i was told not to post it there, which frustrated me since i'd posted much the same stuff before. then later a fight where some people disagreed with me just set me over the edge.

that was when i last posted on tumblr. i was having a meltdown and not in a good headspace.

i took a hard break. i deleted every single messaging/social app from my phone, even the ones that had nothing to do with the drama. i stopped responding to or checking things entirely.

(it turns out the discord server shut down just weeks later due to drama anyway.)

i genuinely believed that everyone hated me and the only way i could make myself deal with that was to cut off contact with everyone.

i've spent the last 6 months dealing with my shit, getting better therapy, and slowly re-engaging.

to be honest i am proud of myself that i survived until now because things were very rough and i wasn't dealing well.

i'm in college now. i'm meeting new people and making new friends. things are going a lot better.

thank you to all the people on nano that gave me advice and encouragement about college and applications, and about my family emergencies and grief.

thank you to all the people on nano who stood up for me and supported me through the toxicity i faced while y'all dealt with your own.

i hope i've been able to do the same for some of you.

to some degree, this is the grad post i'd always hoped to make. i know most people won't see this, and i don't know how many of y'all will care. but i'm ok with that now. i'm sharing to get this off my chest and maybe also hope that my friends who see this will know where i've been.

i know what the worry is like when someone disappears and we don't know if they're in trouble with their parents or if they've had a mental health crisis or something. i've seen that play out on nano before.

to anyone who knows me, you're welcome to reach out. i won't be super active on here. but i will be here for any of you who need my support. y'all gave me yours.

this is a bittersweet goodbye to nano as well. the forums have been gone for nearly a year and i will not be participating in the challenge this fall.

i will remember our little community, the good and the bad. i hope i will remember what i've learned from it.

keep writing, lovelies. keep being your amazing selves.

-shadows

[ellipsus-writes]

We know many of you have seen NaNoWriMo's recent statements on generative AI...

Well, we have too—and that's why we've made the decision to retract our sponsorship of NaNo.

Your support and belief in human creativity, transparency and collaboration mean everything to us, and we're committed to staying true to that. Thank you all! 💙

You can read our full statement here.

The Ellipsus team xo