NaNoWriMo is shutting down. This is old news by now, of course, having come out a couple of weeks ago. But I forgot to register my opinion about it, and in these interconnected days of social media and instant news, everyone is expected to have an opinion on everything. So here’s mine.

It’s a damn shame. I have a long history with National Novel Writing Month; my wife first introduced me to it back in 2001, and I participated every year from them to 2017, when I experienced some sort of burnout. I wrote many novels, from Unfallen in 2003 through the first draft of And the Devil Will Drag You Under in 2017 (which only got half-written). I was a Municipal Liaison with my friend Kat for eleven of those years in the city of Sacramento until I got burned out on that as well. I helped fundraise for the organization and, with Kat, set up events in our city and so on. Back when they held the NIght of Writing Dangerously in San Francisco, I went just about every year (until they finally canceled it because it cost more than it was earning).

Alas, the pandemic took its toll. The organization had been struggling a bit financially in the years leading up to 2020. In 2020 they took out a loan from the federal government to help them through it, but they were never able to make up the revenue. Membership kept dropping, and donations fell.

Part of it was the new forum software that they introduced when they revamped the website in, I think, 2019 (someone correct me if I’m wrong on this). The forum software prior to this was easy to manage, easy to read, easy to navigate. The new forum design, unfortunately, was none of those things. Because of its difficulty and lack of support, users fled the NaNoWriMo forums for local forums on Facebook, Discord, and Slack. Some of that fleeing, I think, was simply reaction to a big change, but most of it was genuine frustration and annoyance. With the loss of people to the forums, donations naturally went down.

Then in 2023, there was an issue with the forum moderation. A big issue. One of the moderators in the teen forum section was accused of “grooming” minors and sending them to an inappropriately sex website. The organization banned the moderator as soon as they learned about this, but they dragged their feet on investigating the problem. Many members canceled their membership after this happened, and donations collapsed. Honestly, I should have canceled my own membership back then, but I wanted to stick around to download all my historical information. I just never got around to that.

To combat this from happening in the future, NaNoWriMo did a few things: first, they shut down the forums (from mid-November 2023), which drove even more people to their local organizations. Then they put strict regulations on MLs and other volunteers: the volunteers had to submit to background checks, they had to prevent minors from participating in local live events, and all local forums had to be English-only, even in coutries that don’t speak English. Volunteers left, as you can imagine. For NaNoWriMo, no one volunteered to be Municipal Liaisons.

Then in 2024, NaNoWriMo chose to partner with a sponsor that was heavily into generative AI. Generative AI (horribly misnamed, but whatever) is, as you might know, extremely controversial in author circles. The companies that create these models, such as Athropic, Meta, and so on, are known to browse the web and pull in writing from as many authors as they can, using legal and illegal means (they undoubtedly scraped this blog, and I’ve taken extreme measures in the past couple of months to block their crawlers). Then these LLMs use this content against the wishes of the writers to generate their answers and their own writing. Authors, as you may guess, hate this. But NaNoWriMo partnered with this company anyway, then went and put out a statement that unconditional hatred of generative AI was classist and ableist. This is when I canceled my own membership, along with hundreds of other people. And donations plummeted yet again.

So this year they shut down. NoMoNaNoWriMo.

It hasn’t been announced on their website, which they’re leaving up so that members can download all their historical information such as novels they’ve written and their wordcount histories. They did, however, post this video to YouTube:

In short, they outlined their financial troubles, and then they named “community vitriol” as the source for many of these troubles, without acknowledging entirely why the vitriol existed.

I’m going to miss NaNoWriMo. I had lots of fun at write-ins (including the above-mentioned Night of Writing Dangerously), I enjoyed the community and the forums, and I wrote some great novel drafts. It gave me the kick in the pants that I needed to get my writing butt in gear.

I do believe the spirit of NaNoWriMo will live on. People will continue to take on the challenge of writing a novel in a month, whether that month is still November or elsewhen in the year. Me, I’m pretty much writing full-time, year-round (when I’m not at my Day Job, at least), and having a blast doing it. I’ve found other communities to join. And so on.

If you’re a NaNoWriMo refugee, I commiserate.

Be safe out there. It’s a rough time for people, so be kind as well.

For now, it’s back to work for me.