So, I’ve done NaNoWriMo for the past five years, and I’ve written a whole bunch during these Novembers, the majority of four books and a good chunk of Daros (my college was trying to illegitimately sack me during November 2020, so writing suffered that year).

The official NaNoWriMo organization has screwed up some things pretty hard recently. One of those was keeping creepy teen community forum leaders in place despite complaints, squelching some complaints, and then not really being open about any of it. Another was promoting a predatory fake publishing company to their users. Today, they posted a policy saying that it’s fine to use AI for your writing project, which is the opposite of the point of the event. You can write 50,000 words in seconds (at the expense of a chunk of global warming) with ChatGPT, and that isn’t special at all. They also asserted that it’s ableist and classist to criticize the use of ChatGPT, which convoluted argument has further pissed off a bunch of economically disadvantaged disabled writers who have been doing just fine.

A bunch of people are abandoning the organization for these and other issues, which is appropriate – people get to respond however they want, and there’s more than enough to justify some action.

Some others are promising to block/ban/cancel anybody who still tries to do a lot of writing in November and gets excited about doing so, which, like many overheated cancellation attempts, strikes me as an overreach. I wish we could point out the wrong in something these days without also self-righteously threatening the choices and needs of other people just trying to get by.

For my part, I’m going to leave behind the official NaNo site and no longer enter my projects or progress there. I never used it much for community or anything else, although it was fun to hit the achievements as I wrote each year. But there are plenty of word-counting sites available elsewhere. I’m still going to do a bunch of writing in November. It’s fun for me, and a good annual habit, and it’s been rewarding each year I’ve done it.

I want to read stories by people, not computers. Having an algorithm cobble together a miasma of stolen sources, math, and bullshit creates soulless fakery. It bears no resemblance to the long tradition of storytellers, from those sitting around a fire in the Stone Age to those with fingers flying over keys today, sharing their experiences and imagination with other humans.