Howdy, squiders. I have survived the first weekend of my leadership training, and I got everything ready and dropped off at the consignment sale. Phew. Of course, now I need to get back into everything I neglected while I was working on those…
There’s still a second weekend for the leadership training (not this weekend, but next) but my personal contributions are much less, so I’m not too worried about it.
Of course, getting out of that mindset and into the mindset where I can think about literally anything else has been…difficult. But we’re working on it.
The big news this week is that Nano is officially dead. It’s not a surprise, and I find myself not terribly torn up about it, but I think that’s because I already mourned it when the child grooming allegations and the terrible way that was handled came to light. I will miss it. It really helped me get started in my adult writing and provided me with the knowledge that I could write a novel, and it’s provided many friends along the way.
(I actually downloaded all my stats off the site a few months ago, when rumors of shutdown began to swirl. TrackBear provided a handy link to transfer all the data over.)
The organization changed a bunch between when I first did it in 2003 and when I last did it in 2023. I think there were…5000 of us? And you absolutely could keep up with the whole forum and know people from all over.
I participated in the first Script Frenzy. (The only time I did.) The first Night of Writing Dangerously. (Where I consumed my first Redbull and promptly disassociated, and didn’t touch one again until about two months ago.)
(I can tell exactly where in that draft that kicked in.)
I used to mentor Nano newbies and help mail out gear from Nano HQ, which at the time was a tiny little place up in Oakland. I knew Chris Baty and sometimes he remembered my name.
After the first few years that I won, I started to try something new every year. New genres. New viewpoints. Different story structures. If we were going to wildly write 50000 words in a month we might as well try something interesting and see how we liked it.
I found other writing communities through Nano, most notably the Spork Room, which started as a thread on the Nano boards before it spun off into its own forums. But also WriYe, and April Fool’s (defunct for many years now), and a handful of others here and there.
As I’ve mentioned before, starting in 2013 I didn’t participate every year, and it became less relevant to my own writing over time. It felt like the event became less accessible over time as well–too big, too unwieldy, and after the last website redesign, the forums were basically unusable and the buddy system that had been in place for years was essentially destroyed. It kind of feels like it never really recovered after that (2019), and nothing but bad decision after bad decision followed that.
I do wonder where we will go from here. Writing challenges have been around forever, but none of them have ever had the momentum Nano had. The amount of people participating made it a real event, one people looked forward to each year, planning months in advance. One that existed online and in person, and had the creativity energy to sweep you up and drag you along.
I don’t know that anything can replace it. Maybe nothing should.
But I do remember finishing my first complete draft. How proud I was. How much confidence it gave me. A lot of that draft was written during Nano 2004, and who knows how long it would have taken me otherwise if left to my own devices.
Other people deserve to have that feeling.
Who knows. Maybe something else will come along. But I don’t think it will be one of the other things clamoring to be the “next Nanowrimo.” There’s too many trying, not enough momentum behind any of them.
What do you think, squiders? Are you a writer, and did you do Nano? Have you seen any glimpses of something new?
