Not gonna lie, I miss NaNoWriMo. Until I finally got around to organizing my WIP pile, or at least faking it convincingly, I was one of those guys with sprawling, cinematic stories running through his head but no idea how to get them onto the page. I started my first book in the summer of 2001. It didn’t have a title yet, just TAYUNP (The As-Yet Untitled Novel Project). Between that and a short-story spin-off, my total creative word count from 2001 to 2016 was about 60,000 words. That’s fifteen years of effort for what most romance authors crank out before lunch.
Meanwhile, in my day job as a business analyst, I was writing more than anyone should be allowed to legally. We’re talking tens of thousands of words per week. They called me “Tolstoy,” not because my documentation was profound, but because it was long, dense, and only slightly less cheerful than War and Peace. Meanwhile, I thought of myself as more of a “Robbe-Grillet:” emotionally detached, meticulous in detail, beloved by intellectual snobs, unreadable to humans.
NaNoWriMo, and my interactions with fellow NaNo people (contestants? subjects?), gave me a new perspective on writing. Namely, that it’s possible. I’d always wanted to write novels, but I didn’t know how people actually managed it. I assumed authors sat in cozy libraries channeling divine inspiration through fountain pens while I sat in a cubicle channeling despair and burnout through Microsoft Word. NaNo sang to me, “Forget all that. Just start typing and don’t stop.”
It sounds dumb, but it worked. Hanging out with other sleep-deprived masochists every November taught me to stop worrying about whether it’s “good.” I needed to quit tweaking the same six chapters and get some damn words on the page. Type whatever I have until I reach the end, then come back and fix it later; repeat until my fingers ache and the coffee budget requires a line item on my taxes.
Before that, my “process” was a nightmare. I approached fiction the same way I approached software documentation. First, document the vision; then, document the detailed requirements; then, document the risks; then, document the cost-benefit analysis … and so forth. There is zero tolerance for errors, and you must ensure that all sections align 100% at all times. Every writing session began with me reopening Chapter 1 and fixing every microscopic flaw in everything I already had before adding the next sentence. In technical writing, that’s called quality control. In fiction, it’s called creative self-immolation.
NaNo gave me permission to be messy. I also learned that outlining actually helps (who knew?), that daily writing of any kind is like taking your brain to the gym to keep up muscle tone (only less sweaty and painful), that writing is cheaper than therapy (depending on where the group meets), and that perfection is a myth invented by people who don’t finish things (I … I wouldn’t know).
Of course, NaNo also gifted me a few bad habits. Quantity is not quality; finishing is great, but maybe your personal goal should extend beyond “I got the T-shirt,” and perhaps you don’t need fourteen open works-in-progress. That last one’s on me. I’m an engineer by nature and therefore incapable of not following the rules to the letter. NaNo’s website clearly said: “Start a new novel on November 1, reach 50,000 words by December 1.” So I did. Every year. For eight straight years. Result: eight half-finished novels, a storage bin full of NaNo shirts that are now politically incorrect to wear, and a deep respect for the human capacity for denial.
Then came the downfall. As of 2025, NaNoWriMo, the organization that was home to a few hundred thousand misfits and holiday orphans for two decades, has closed its doors. The implosion started, as these things often do, with internet outrage. A forum moderator was accused of misconduct on an entirely different website. Allegations flew, but to my knowledge, they were never substantiated. To their detriment, NaNo initially responded by doing nothing, and then by quietly removing the person for reasons they stated were completely unrelated. It’s like someone telling you your kid is playing in the street, and you respond by sticking a knife in a wall outlet. Hang on, though, this is a charity organization that sells NaNo t-shirts and uses 50% of the profits to build libraries for kids in South Asia. I’m sure they didn’t have a crack security team, a corporate legal department, or even much of an HR department. From what I was led to believe, they mostly had a bunch of unpaid Berkeley interns and a copy machine that barely worked most days.
Then came the AI debate, as it always does (insert eyeroll). NaNo refused to either condemn or bless the use of AI editing tools to hit their goals. They never said a word about generative AI writing entire books, as one of their harshest critics later admitted was read into the statement by the triggered; they were talking about using Grammarly and other critique tools. Of course, the purists lost their minds. The anti-Skynet crowd screamed that it ruined the purity of the competition (which was run entirely on the honor system to begin with), while others, possibly rightfully, so they get a pass, interpreted the message to mean, “not everybody has a mind that’s capable of writing an entire book, so they need help.”
It was a no-win scenario. When your board is mostly volunteers paid in coffee mugs, you can’t afford a PR crisis team, so the empire fell. One too many Twitter storms, one too few lawyers or experienced adults in the room.
Which brings us to today. This year, I’ve joined Novel November, run by ProWritingAid.com, ironically, an AI company that sells exactly the kind of tools and services that NaNo was virtually firebombed for refusing to take a stance against. Gone is the grassroots charity raising money for libraries, free laptops for the third world, and workshops for young writers in schools everywhere. In its place, a corporate event where every time I hit a period, the interface chirps, “Would you like to upgrade to our $12.00 a month version to see the other six places you’ve used lazy adverbs?”
I can’t even be mad about it. At least bots don’t get offended. Besides, I’m not here to relive the glory days of online forums and sticker charts. I’ve always been about spewing out words, meeting people who share my passion for the struggle, and keeping my creative brain engaged so that my blood pressure stays within normal limits and I don’t strangle my coworkers. NaNo gave me all that for the first time. If the new one comes with pop-up ads for “premium friendship” and the camaraderie is a HAL 9000 telling me I might consider a less cliché adverb in that sentence, then that’s the reality. It’s apparently what everyone wanted. If that’s the price of progress, I’ll pay it … apparently on a monthly subscription basis.
