Sheila Rambles

 The reason I've been ranting about NaNoWriMo for the past several posts is not because I don't care about them, but that I care very much. The first novel-sized piece of writing I ever completed was a NaNo project, and it was proof that I really could do it. I succeeded thirteen more times and had a blast. It absolutely breaks my heart to see NaNoWriMo in a death spiral from one person's ego and incompetence. I still have the novels, though. Somewhere along the line, I started to stitch them together into a unified setting I called the Juneiverse. (It's named after the protagonist of the second NaNo project I ever completed.) And somewhere further along the line, I decided to reboot the first one and offer it for sale. It ended up being the first volume of a trilogy. I've rebooted the other two books, too, but those are still being edited. When they're done, they'll also be put up for purchase. Now, as I'm writing this, the book isn't available yet...

 Dear NaNoWriMo.org-- I'd already planned to skip National Novel Writing Month this year, in part so I can devote my time to getting a novel (a novel rooted in my first NaNo win, in fact) formatted for EPUB and prepped for public release, but mostly because I don't have any ideas particularly burning to get out. My brain is focused on the Christophina saga, and I have no new volumes that I want to work on just yet. When you chucked several marginalized groups under a bus to keep people from criticizing you about your stance on generative AI, I decided that even if I did  do National Novel Writing Month, I would not do it on the official site--I would use TrackBear to graph my wordcount and find a Discord server where people were doing it unofficially. However, I did not delete my account, as many have, because I still hold out hope that the event can be recovered. What does recovery look like to me? Three things: 1. Get rid of Kilby Blades . This is non-negotiable. She has d...

 Well, well, the word got out, didn't it? The folks at NaNoWriMo HQ have edited the page where they called objections to AI ableist and classist, and posted a statement that comes down to "sorry if it came across that we were accusing AI critics of being ableist and classist, we didn't really mean it quite like that , and, no, we're not going to apologize to the people we used as human shields to justify our argument." Is this really the hill you want to die on, NaNoPeople? Because I think you're going to die on it. That said, there are some things I've been seeing that starting to nark at me and if I can rant about Oxford commas, I can rant about these things, too. 1. They're going to sell your novels to the AI people!  Nobody who declares this actually has evidence, of course, it's just "the sort of thing they would do." I see this a lot from people who don't seem to understand how NaNoWriMo works in the first place. For a while, y...

 Boy howdy, did you shit the bed. I know you lost a lot of people with the grooming scandal on the forums. I stood by you, NaNoWriMo, even then, because your board stepped in and promised real action. Which...hasn't really been done? Moderator X has been sacked, but the forums are still in limbo and we're closing in on a year since they were shut down. But that's not really what my problem is. You're under no legal obligation to even have  forums and I can just write it off as This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things. I only just now learned about the controversy over you plugging known vanity presses, so that's not really what my problem is, either. I'll just say...really? I don't even have a problem with your refusal to condemn the use of AI in novel-making. I work in AI; it pays my bills. If somebody wants a fast-food novel instead of writing one from scratch, I guess that's what works for them. I even understand why  you're refusing to take a s...

 I finished drafting Christophina's Moon  last week. Grabbed the epilogue from the zero draft, updated it to match the reboot, grafted it on (because it was Camp NaNoWriMo and I set my own rules), and hit the finish line. Yeah. Next step is to add a scene to Christophina's Garden  so I can submit it to my writers group and set things in motion to get that book gone over, whilst also doing a final grind and polish on Christophina's Wings . I'll be consulting my niece for some insights into ice skating. Things like that. I still don't seem to have a sense of completion, since I've gone from finishing one thing to revising another. I probably won't feel complete about this trilogy until I've shipped out that last one for publication,

 Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel today, as she spent all her writerly energy drafting a short story to submit to an anthology of interest to her.