In Memory of NaNoWriMo

10.26.25 // 2:35pm

As of writing this blog, it is October 25th, 2025. Halloween is six days away, and my handsome boyfriend’s anticipated trip is only five days away. The seasons are changing: the omnipresent roasting heat that is a desert summer is slowly cooling into a tolerable fall. I have a cold, as I do every year around this time. I’m finally able to go outside again, and when I do, I’m struck by how fall it feels. The cool, dry air feels so nostalgic and familiar on my skin: it’s like a comforting embrace after months of branding burns. It smells different, too—it’s lighter, softer. We don’t have changing leaves here in the desert, so the arrival of autumn is subtle, but it’s still definitely there.

I love this time of year. Halloween is one of my favorite holidays, and I love festive fall activities. I always find myself waking up from my seasonal depression around this time. In a place as hot as this, I feel the worst during the summer, when I can’t go outside and I’m always sodden with sweat. Fall and winter are welcome reprieves. That smell of autumn awakens something in me. Not only do I feel refreshed, but I’m reminded of when I was young, with Halloween so close at hand—and November not that far behind.

November was special to me as a child. Starting in the seventh grade, I was an avid participant in National Novel Writing Month, colloquially shortened to NaNoWriMo (or Nano/Nanowrimo, as I will be referring to it in the rest in this blog). If you don’t know, Nanowrimo is a now-defunct nonprofit organization that focused on creative writing year-round, but specifically through its titular event in November, where people were encouraged to finish a 50,000 word novel in thirty days.

I am certain I have a t-shirt with this insignia somewhere in my closet.

Past tense, yes, and defunct. Nanowrimo shuttered its doors last year after a number of controversies. I hadn’t been on the frontlines of Nano for a while, but from what I can gather, those controversies were two fold: one of them involved rumors of a moderator in the Young Writers Program (YWP) grooming young writers, and the second involved Nanowrimo taking sponsorships from generative AI corporations, citing that “expecting someone with disabilities to be able to write a novel in a month [without help of this generative AI program] is classist and ableist”, or something to that effect.

On the first point. I was a member of the YWP for about three years, from the seventh grade to either the ninth or tenth grade (roughly fifteen-thirteen-ish years ago… psychic damage). I remember first hearing about it from my middle school’s library. The YWP was essentially a mini-version of the main Nano site for anyone under eighteen: it had a profile system where you could create summaries for your project and track your word count, a direct messaging system, and of course, forums. I spent loooooots of time on the Nano forums. It was my messaging board of choice, second to Neopets (I had grown out of IGN and Freewebs—the site I had mentioned in my first blog—by the sixth grade). There were lots of different boards that focused on “character building” and “plot brainstorming”, which, when you were thirteen, boiled down to chatplaying with your OCs and infodumping about your nonsensical “plot bunnies”.

This is the site as I remember it. Woof, nostalgia.

If I recall correctly, I got the most invested in the YWP forums my freshmen year of high school. I was like, so cool on there. I posted all of the time. I had lots of close friends. I even had an online girlfriend who I later went on to meet in real life… and we broke up not even two days later, because we were both horribly awkward—in addition to this girlfriend cheating on me with someone else on the YWP forums. Not to toot my own horn, but I think me and my group on the forums were the reason they had to bring in a moderation team in the first place—we were wild, political, and didn’t like people telling us no.

I recall a particular instance where they brought in a new mod who, in her introduction, said that she was an older, religious woman who had a strong relationship with Christ. After she became moderator, they started implementing your general toothless “don’t discuss anything political oe sexual, including sexuality” rules. This pissed me off so badly. I identified as bisexual at the time, and I wrote post after post about how unethical it was for Nano to hire a bigot to moderate the forums. I remember that I would upload gigantic images of Pinkie Pie because they didn’t have any hard limits on file size and would crash the forums for days at a time.

This kind of overlapped with my 4chan phase too, if you couldn’t guess.

I don’t think I was ever officially Banned, but I remember that moderator wrote me a personal letter pleading for me to stop. At that point, I was fed up with the YWP, so I decided to hop over to Tumblr alongside my ex, where I stayed until the Dawn Of The Final Day—sometime in 2017, when the porn ban struck. Although I am thinking about using Tumblr again… somehow, compared to Twitter and Bluesky, it seems like the least evil option. Which is insane.

Anyway. I wasn’t groomed on the YWP. I was on Tumblr! But not the YWP. But I can definitely confirm that, with the way the forums were set up—lawless wastelands ran by snarling children Lord of the Flies style with moderators constantly chased to the hills—it would’ve definitely been possible. There were no protections: I was easily able to move to a then-NSFW site, for instance, because there was no form of key word filtering. I was really annoyed with the Neopets moderation when I was younger—it was incredibly strict, including banning discussions of real world topics and offsite links—but in retrospect, I think it was necessary and, dare I say, Good. I can safely say that I was never preyed upon by anyone on Neopets my entire decade spent there, and I would suspect it’s thanks to those incredibly strict filters.

I had a completely ungoverned experience on the internet, and I wouldn’t wish that upon any minor. Even here on Neocities, I see lots of nostalgia-core blogs run by literal sixteen-year-olds wishing that they could’ve experienced the “golden age” of the internet, with forums and Myspace and the like and… no. You don’t. Moderation is good. You shouldn’t be on the internet period except for playing like, Webkinz or Millsbury or coolmathgames.com. Or Roblox. I think children these days play Roblox.

Not that Roblox is any safer than social media, and children are probably only on it due to the fact that these kid-friendly sites are a thing of the past. I do believe that children need to be protected on the internet… but jeopardizing individual privacy by, like, uploading your ID to a database of “people who look at porn sites” isn’t the solution.

Anyway, I digress. The point is that the YWP was definitely not safe, and I’m surprised it took that long for any controversy surrounding it to be reported. Despite it being formative for me, if they weren’t prepared to manage a forum for children safely—including vetting their moderators—then it deserved to be shut down.

The second point—about generative AI—is also absolutely heartbreaking. And infuriating. It’s ableist and classist to assume everybody can write a novel in a month, MY ASS. The point of Nanowrimo was to push your creativity and work ethic to the extreme. It was about coming together with like-minded writers to engage in a month-long scramble to the finish line. Nano novels aren’t supposed to be good: they’re messy, rough, and riddled with problems. You’re not supposed to write something perfect—you’re supposed to write something. The point is to push back every nagging voice in your head telling you that it isn’t perfect, you have to fix it, you have to go back, and instead just write. Just create. Just make it—it can be fixed later, but in order to fix it, you first have to make it.

I think that’s a beautiful sentiment. I, personally, struggle a lot with executive dysfunction. I know that there’s something I have to do, or even want to do… and when I start, I can usually get it done fast and have fun doing it. My problem is starting, period. I tell myself that I don’t have enough time, or I’m not in the right headspace, or that it’s not going to be perfect so why try… and so many other excuses. Nanowrimo encouraged me to let that nagging voice inside of myself go and just write. I’ve been able to complete Nanowrimo several times. And no, the novels weren’t good, but they were made, and they were mine. And I could go back and edit them come December and the following year, because they were there! Without Nano, I would never have been able to bring those stories to life.

That’s why the idea of using generative AI to “help you” with Nano is the most asinine, stupid shit I’ve ever heard. If you’re using AI, you didn’t fucking make it. I don’t care if you’re using it to brainstorm or write paragraphs for you or fill in blanks—it’s all the same shit. You didn’t make it. Not only did you not make it, but you’re actively employing the use of a tool that STOLE all of its training data from authors without their permission. It’s a plagiarism tool: genAI didn’t write its novel, someone else did who it patently stole from… and if you use genAInin ANY capacity, you DEFINITELY didn’t write your novel. And for the company to hide its greed behind fake sincerity—to use people’s real struggles with disabilities and money as an excuse for their grubby little mouths to suckle on that sweet sweet techbro teat—is absolutely disgusting. Now there’s blog and Reddit posts about how “radical wokeism” killed Nanowrimo. That wasn’t “wokeism”, it was corporate greed masquerading as wokeism. Get it right, you fucking leeches.

If you support generative AI for creative endeavors, I don’t fuck with you. GTFO.

I understand that nonprofits have to somehow make enough money to keep afloat. If they wanted to take a sketchy sponsor, that’s on them. Fine. Sure. Just don’t treat it like it’s a good thing. The doubling-down from community leaders about how good and generous the sponsor was actually is insane—they should’ve just… not talked about it, and the issue probably would’ve blown over for anyone that isn’t a radical lefty (like, you know, me). How this company thought for an instant that their main userbase overlapped in any way with the lazy-ass grifters using genAI for content is beyond me. They were money-hungry, nothing more. After that controversy, Nano cited “lack of sponsors” and “community vitriol” as the reason it was shutting down. I was told that the forums closed down long before that (due to the aforementioned YWP issue and I guess unwillingness to fix themselves), splintering the community across the web… so I suppose the writing had been on the wall for a while.

It’s bittersweet. I love the idea of Nanowrimo. I met so many creative, wonderful, and strange people through the program—both through the YWP and the main site, when I graduated to it. I wrote hundreds of thousands of words over the years. It was wonderful to be able to connect to fellow creative people and lean on each other to help hone each others’ crafts. I’m sad that it doesn’t exist anymore. It will never exist again. The internet, and the world, is a much different place than it was in 1999—it is fractured and lonely. Giant forums like Nano are a thing of the past. There might be Discord servers, sure, or Facebook communities or subreddits or whatever or wherever, but it will never be the same as the Nanowrimo site. Being able to customize your book and update your wordcount, then go on the forums and see how everybody else was doing on their journey—it was wonderful. It was magical. I’m devastated that young writers will never be able to experience that same joy.

At the same time, though, Nanowrimo was an evil organization that hired predators and took money from generative AI corporations, and for that, it deserved to burn down. This, I stand by.

Burn, baby, burn.

Nanowrimo is, at its core, an idea. I could do Nanowrimo at any time: I could open a new word doc, give myself thirty days to crank out 50k words, and set to it. There’s nothing stopping me. But, for people like me who have executive dysfunction and struggle with willpower, seeing an entire community rally together around the same challenge was really motivating. It was what inspired me, year after year, to keep coming back.

I took a three-year break from Nano, and when I came back this year, it was dissolved. So now I’m sitting here wondering—what now? Where do we go from here?

I do not think something like Nanowrimo will ever exist again. There seems to be a spattering of alternatives out there—Writing Month is one of them, though I haven’t signed up for it. I’m sure there’s local writing groups in my area, but they seem awfully cliquey and difficult to worm my way into. I unfortunately think there’s but one solution to this: I simply have to do it myself.

It’s going to be hard, but I’d like to try to participate in my own version of Nanowrimo again, and I'm gonna call it RainBeauWriMo! I don’t think I’m going to aim for an entire novel, but rather crank out things I’ve been trying to write for a while but find myself lacking the willpower for—fanfiction, OC fic and the like. I’m going to have to start on November 5th rather than the first, since my beloved boyfriend is in town and I am NOT going to waste our valuable time together—but starting then, I want to try to write 50k words of original content. Whether it be fanfiction, new OC backgrounds, or even blog posts or diary entries… I want to make something! I made this entire website, and I’m capable of anything!

It’s a pretty low goal for me—my Nano record is around 90k—but I don’t want to wig myself out. I’d also like to involve my site in my project somehow! I think I’m going to put a floating pop up on the front page with a link to a “blog post” documenting what I wrote each day. We’ll see if I can manage it! Writing and updating my site every day seems like a lot… but it’s a challenge I’d like to try. Ultimately, I should be creating content for me, not for anybody else. I still miss the connections that Nanowrimo fostered, and I would still like to make more writing (and websiteing!) friends—but I think I have to tend to my foundations first. I can’t very well head to a writers group if I have nothing to show for it!

Anyway… that’s my goal! Wish me luck! And I wish you luck, too, in anything you’re striving to create. You’re capable of anything! And you don’t need AI to do it for you.