What NowNoWriMo?

What Now(NoWriMo)?

(image of a November calendar page with a giant question mark over it)

 The beloved month-long writing fest that has dominated my November for over two decades... is not so beloved by everyone anymore. From the child-grooming moderator to the board’s support of LLM (“AI”) tools (to the extent of calling their critics ableist and classist,) the train wreck has been leaving the tracks, and it's been on fire, for about 11 months now. You can read the detailed timeline on this doc.

As someone who has dedicated a podcast to beginning writers for going on 20 years now, NaNoWriMo has been important to me as a similar vehicle to help folks. And now I don't want to support them, so what do we do?

Some people said just keep writing in November, we don't need them! I mean, yeah, that’s technically true, but if we didn’t need it, then everyone would already be writing their books. What NaNoWriMo offered us was community, a challenge, wordcount tracking, and just a feeling of shared effort. You’re not alone, it told us. There was something about everyone struggling through the same thing at the same time that really tied people together in November, and I loved that.

I went searching a new November … challenge? community? something? to focus on, and found one surprisingly quickly.

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