The Death of NaNoWriMo

 This is the way it all ends

This is the way it all ends

Not with a bang

But a PowerPoint presentation


So, I just watched the YouTube video about The State of NaNoWriMo, narrated by Kilby Blades, which can be summed up as We don't know how to manage money and you didn't give us enough, so we're closing down. Oh, and some of you were mean to us on the internet, which has something to do with it for some reason. She does at least acknowledge the grooming scandal, and she mentions how terribly, terribly misunderstood that AI piece was, while acting as if that wasn't practically the death blow for the organization, since everyone from individual donors to entire sponsors stopped giving them money.

She talks briefly about the MLs, but doesn't say a word about the restrictive and, in some locations, illegal contract they were handed if they wanted to continue to volunteer. She certainly doesn't say anything about the fact that she effectively fired every single ML in 2024, even the ones who were prepared to sign the contract. The fundraising that MLs and their Regions did for the organization gets a sentence's worth of acknowledgement, but implies that only "some" MLs did that, while I remember having "donation wars" with other Regions, which was apparently a widespread practice. There are lots of things like this in the video--stuff that either gets downplayed, spun, or ignored.

My first NaNoWriMo was in 2004, with a novel called Sam and Charlie Go on a Roadtrip. I didn't finish it. I tried again the following year and started an eight-year streak of wins. I wrote some work I'm very proud of, and plan to redo for publication. NaNo was a big part of my evolution as a writer. But I'm not precisely sad about its passing. In some ways (see previous entries) I've been mourning it for years. I miss what it was, but I'm okay with the ending of what it became.

Will I write a novel this November? I might. I've got Trackbear to chart my wordcount and the Atlanta Region cut ties with the official organization years ago, and they have a lovely Discord server to hang with fellow Wrimos in. I do want to reboot another NaNovel I've written, and that would be a perfect time to do it.

NaNoWriMo is over. And yet NaNoWriMo will live on.


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