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Episode 82: NaNoNowWhat?

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It’s that time of year again. You may love it, hate it, fear it, or be totally uninterested. I’m talking about…well, what you’re calling it now depends on your history with it and your feelings on the way things went down. It used to be National Novel Writing Month, aka., NaNoWriMo, and in some cases it still is. Some are calling it Novel November. Others seem to be not calling it anything and just *describing* what it is.

For the sake of ease, I’ll be calling it NaNoWriMo (or NaNo for short) during the full duration of its existence as a nonprofit. After that, I’ll see how I feel.

Please see my list of sources in the show notes, but it mostly consists of an interview with Chris Baty from the still extant NaNo YouTube channel, a big, dramatic deep dive created by Savy Writes Books (also on YouTube), a number of blogs and articles from around the web, and a couple Reddit threads and Google Docs.

This is a rabbit hole. I set out to write something about commodifying creativity and the problems of centralizing movements under capitalism. But it ended up being so much more than that, and though I have put in over twenty-hours of research, this still feels like a shallow reading. 

I’m going to do my best to sum everything up according to my understanding of what happened. This is all based on what I’ve been able to find, the main NaNo website and forums themselves are shut down. So, there are obviously going to be some missing pieces in my understanding.

But I believe survivors. And if you think that sounds a little dramatic for me to throw in, just wait.

I’ll warn you right now that unfortunately one part of this will include some pretty nasty predatory behavior toward kids. I’ll be sure to throw out another warning when we get there.

So, if you don’t already know, participating in National Novel Writing Month means you write a fifty-thousand word first draft of your novel all in the month of November, which breaks down to one thousand six hundred and sixty-seven words per day. To some it might sound ridiculous, or on the other hand, if you’re like some of the rapid release writers we’ve talked to on this show in the past, it may sound like a piece of Duncan Hines funfetti cake.

But this isn’t an episode about how to write your novel in November. It isn’t even an episode about AI—although some of you familiar with last year’s events have probably guessed it’s going to figure into it.

This is about what happens when what once was a scrappy project grows beyond your ability to control it. It’s also what happens when you try to put a decentralized movement into a box, or what happens when you turn creating something for the simple joy of it into something that emphasizes the “creator economy.”

It’s what happens when communities are held together by unsuccessful donation drives and shady sponsorships, and its leaders spend more time on begging for funds and shoving complaints under the rug than holding their own staff accountable.

To oversimplify, it’s a worst case scenario of monetizing your hobbies. It’s about how, the bigger you’ve built your big beautiful contraption, the more rocks in the gears make for a spectacular public breakdown.

The Movement

NaNoWriMo started in 1999 in the bay area, kicked off by a guy named Chris Baty, with this email:

“Hear ye hear ye, come one, come all, and dust off those word processing devices. Under the motto, ‘A Lousy Novel is better than no novel at all’ I have declared July National Novel Writing Month. To celebrate, I want to write a novel in a month, and I want you to write one too. Everybody’s got a ton of stories in them. Collectively we’ve lived over seven hundred years and in that time have accumulated enough characters, places, and plot twists to fill a dozen tomes. I am proposing that we seize art by the horns and spill some of those experiences onto the page.”

(By the way yes—you heard that right, it started out in July rather than November, which seems easier to pull off, if less alliterative.)

In his interview on the NaNoWriMo YouTube channel, Baty said he felt like this was going to be one of those things that he and his friends would try, fail at quickly and dramatically, and then never speak of again.

But things went better than expected. Out of the twenty-one friends who participated, six completed a first draft of a novel. So they decided to do it again the next year. This time, the participant count rose to one hundred forty, and twenty-nine people completed their first drafts—or, since NaNo was considered a challenge—they “won.”

When you hear the phrase “exponential growth”—think of NaNoWriMo in 2001. The event rose to five thousand participants. Baty and his friends hadn’t automated anything on their website, so participants had to be added manually to a Yahoo! group, and then to the website, in order to enter their word counts. 

That year, 700 people were validated—all by hand—to have finished their first drafts. The operation grew so much, that their web host said, “You’re taking up all the space we have. Ya gotta go.” Things were only going to get bigger, more time consuming, and more expensive from there.

But also much, much more exciting.

In 2002, the website for National Novel Writing Month moved to a new server and became nanowrimo.org. Someone stepped up to make an automated word counter, the only way they could manage the scale of the challenge. But scale was still a problem. They’d also started selling merch, and during a time where drop-shipping wasn’t a Bay Area buzzword yet, packing and shipping was all done by hand.

But now, what used to be a group of people converging on central website, became something decentralized, and therefore, it *was* much more scaleable. National Novel Writing Month technically wasn’t just a national thing anymore. They had participants living everywhere, with chapters on six continents and participants in seven. Yes, that includes Antarctica.

So what of these “chapters”? How were they all managed?

A core contingent of the NaNo nonprofit model included Municipal Liaisons, also known as “MLs”, because you can’t have an organization without acronyms.

All MLs were volunteers, and there were hundreds of them. They ran and moderated the writers’ forums in different geographical regions scattered around the world—never an easy thing, if you know, you know. They’d organize meetups and writers groups, and offer encouragement to remind writers that they weren’t in this alone. People from all all walks of life surrounded you. There could even be another person in your neighborhood right now, sitting up late tapping their words out, just like you.

In the beginning, NaNoWriMo was defined by these clusters of community all brought together by a shared love of writing and a desire to meet a lifelong goal. Many of the ideas that made NaNo so special came from these local and regional gatherings. Activities would expand over time, both locally and centrally—there was a podcast, features in major newspapers, celebrity pep-talk emails, and a growing number of of satellite events throughout the year. There was Script Frenzy for people who wanted to write screenplays, 30 Covers, 30 Days for people who wanted to work on their book design skills, and Camp NaNoWriMo, that took place in the spring and summer.

NaNo had tons of bells and whistles—different types of participation badges, staff-run sprints, and localized lock-ins where people would focus on churning out as many words as possible in a single night.

And according to Baty, it wasn’t about money.

NaNo wasn’t about capitalism or publishers gatekeeping. It wasn’t about writing a manuscript so you could start shopping it around ASAP. It was about getting together in cafés and online forums to commiserate with other people who had always wanted to write a book and were making it happen. It was about connecting with your local community and with writers all around the world at the same time.

In the words of one of Baty’s interviewers, “You don’t ask knitters when they’re opening up their knitting store.”

But hosting tens of thousands of people in multiple forums, providing them with automated word counters, and eventually paying a staff to manage it all (even though you have a slew of unpaid volunteers)—that costs money.

And as time passed, the money would change the tone and operations of this movement beyond recognition.

The Money

In the 00s (aughts), NaNoWriMo grew, and kept growing.

2005 saw the start of their Young Writer’s Program (referred to as YWP). One hundred schools and four thousand individual kids got in on the challenge that first year. It was a huge hit in English classrooms, where kids were encouraged to set their own writing goals that were more achievable than fifty-thousand words.

In 2006, the team finally turned NaNo into a nonprofit. That was also the year Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants came out, which was a book whose first draft was written during NaNoWriMo. Now someone had produced a New York Times bestseller during the challenge, someone who’d gotten a $5.2 million dollar two-book deal—a far different outcome than the haphazard writing-for-the-hell-of-it ways of “winning” NaNo in the past. 

Word was getting back to HQ that more and more professional authors were using the month of November to kick their novels into gear and knock over the barriers of their own perfectionism. People were starting to see NaNo as a potential selling point for their manuscripts.

Stakes were raised. So were aspirations. And so was pressure on basically everyone—participants, volunteers, and staff alike.

Because when trad publishing enters the picture, money starts mattering a lot more. And, to a growing nonprofit that needs tons of server space, it’s something that already matters a great deal.

(Incidentally, PSA—Americans who are listening, please donate money to your local food bank if you can. It’s a much more effective way to make sure people get fed than donating your old canned beans. It’s about to be a hungry holiday season for a lot of people. PSA over.)

I’m going to read a post from the old NaNoWriMo website that Chris wrote about the initial choice to become a nonprofit. Thanks, archive.org’s WayBack Machine.

“By the end of the third year, though, a new question had come up: money. I had paid for the first and second NaNoWriMos myself, but Year Three posed a dilemma. The web-hosting costs had doubled, and the work of running NaNoWriMo meant I hadn’t been able to take on any freelance writing assignments in October or November. Which left me in an awkward financial situation at the end of November.

“On the last day of the event, I sent out a PayPal request for participants to help pay for the event by chipping in whatever they felt was fair. The mood at the close of that NaNoWriMo was triumphant, and I figured that if everyone who had gotten something worthwhile out of the adventure were to send in $1, I’d have more than enough to build a new automated site, pay the hosting bills, pay my own bills, and take all the year’s volunteers out for a gigantic thank-you pizza.

“This was the start of my education in running an event without a mandatory entry fee. The biggest lesson of which is this: when you make contributions voluntary, very few people volunteer to contribute. No matter how great a time they had or how much they believe in your cause, 90% of participants just won’t find their way to clicking on the PayPal link or mailing in a couple dollars.

“The karmic repercussions of it all were mind-boggling to me. Who _were_ these monsters? I’d spent the last month staying up till 3:00 a.m. every night patiently answering emails, offering encouragement, and giving up every ounce of love and support that the Red Bull hadn’t leached from my body. And when I asked for one dollar in return, they turned a cold shoulder? Was this the definition of community?”

(Skipping ahead a little bit.)

“Either I was a monster, or none of us were monsters. I did some quick calculations and decided, for the sake of my self-image, that none of us were monsters. We were just busy. With our hearts in the right places and way too much going on in our lives for us to always remember to support the institutions that made us happy.”

That realization, Baty says, made him intent on doing more to communicate NaNo’s value to participants.

And it even seems to have worked for a while. But same as any company or nonprofit that needs funds to operate, staying in the good graces of participants is mandatory, and that’s especially true when you’re running an event that people can just as easily do without a central hub.

In 2013, Chris moved on from leading the nonprofit, but he’d been joined by lots of other people from the tech and nonprofit industries over the years. People have really nice things to say about him, and generally the bigger problems began after others took over ops from where he’d left off.

First, there was executive director Grant Faulkner. According to former employees, he was a lot more focused on the financial than the creative side of things. One of them recalled him standing behind her desk as she scrolled Etsy’s collection of fan-made NaNoWriMo merch.

“I always mean to send these people C&Ds for copyright infringement,” she reported him saying. And that was a tell–a sign that the spirit of the event had shifted from a collection of people pursuing their writing dreams to an organization that was just as dollar-driven as any other.

The more intense focus on finances led to greater pressure placed on the MLs (Municipal Liaisons, if you recall). I want to be clear: MLs are all volunteers, as opposed to Mods, who were paid honorariums or were full-on staff members.

I mentioned that celebrity writer s often wrote “pep talk” emails to raise writers’ spirits and solicit donations. But now, the MLs were expected to write daily donation emails too. They were also encouraged to visit schools and recruit teachers and teens into the Young Writer’s Program (YWP). 

When 2020 hit, with all events going online, things got even more intense. All the MLs were expected to create regional Discord servers and manage online events over Zoom. There were issues with a huge new website build that ended up having massive accessibility issues, especially for visually impaired users; and you can see more about how that led to ableism on that Savy Writes Books deep dive I’ve linked.

This increasingly rough treatment of MLs, combined with the controversies of 2022, 23, and finally, 24, the organization was well on its way to imploding. And now I’m going to get into those, to the best of my ability, but bear with me. There’s just not enough time for me to fit all of it in.

2022—Inkitt…or not

With the difficulty NaNoWriMo always seemed to have getting their robust community to donate, they started getting sponsorships to run the event each year. And, with sponsorships comes risks.

In this case, one of the sponsors was Inkitt. It’s a website kind of like Wattpad, where writers publish original serialized fiction. Also, notably, it doesn’t let you turn off tracking cookies when you’re visiting their website, and I think that really says something. So, I will not be linking you to it. 

What I will be linking you to is Victoria Strauss’s Writer Beware article that starts in 2016 and is updated through 2024. She points out initial and ongoing issues with Inkitt’s contracts, specifically the rights that they claim from enlisted authors. In a 2018 update, Strauss claimed they had, “an all-rights contract; Inkitt claims “the sole and exclusive” right to exploit or license just about every right and subsidiary right in existence.”

This seems like the sort of business that I need to do a deep-dive on down the road, especially since part of the aim of Hybrid Pub Scout is to make sure authors know how to avoid predatory presses. But for now, let’s just say that at the time, they had fishy contract language, claimed all (or almost all) rights, and didn’t have a track record of delivering on their promises.

So, in 2022, Inkitt became one of NaNoWriMo’s sponsors, and NaNo sponsors give a menu of “winner goodies” (yes, I’m cringing at that just as hard as you are) once people validated their finished novels.

Inkitt offered a “chance to win publishing contracts, social media spotlights, and more!” That “publishing contract” gave Inkitt first publishing rights, which prevents the author from selling the book anywhere else. It also dangled the hope that they’d shop the book to, as they called them “A-List” publishing houses. I can tell you, as can most people with some experience in publishing, that a book that’s already been serialized online rarely if ever is attractive to a publishing house. Sorry.

You know who might not realize that, though? A starry-eyed NaNoWriMo participant who just submitted their first “winning” 50k novel first draft.

So, knowing this, author and blogger Kestrel Casey took to the NaNo forums to express her concern. She describes the fallout as follows:

  • “The mods panicked
  • I was banned for disparaging a sponsor
  • I wrote this post
  • Other authors joined me in saying that Inkitt was not okay
  • The mods presumably had a long and stressful meeting
  • The mods un-banned me (and others) and sent both public and personal apologies
  • I, for one, absolutely forgave them, because the core issue here is not their fault
  • We all settled down for a long talk in the forums about sponsors, forum moderation policies, and how to make sure all this never happens again, which is ongoing at time of writing.”

(Well…less so now.)

There was a lesson here: NaNoWriMo prioritized their sponsors, and they seemed to be doing so at the expense of their users.

And post-November, the organization actually behaved pretty reasonably about it. They apologized, pledged not to let it happen again, and brought on Victoria Strauss herself as a consultant to help guide their sponsorship decisions.

But the fact that they took responsibility for this debacle would not be a preview of things to come. Because they were about to very-much-not-take responsibility for something much more important. And this is where we get into the darker stuff I referred to at the top of the podcast: NaNo’s inaction against child predators, and it’s coverup of said predatory behavior.

Consider this your trigger warning.

2023 Child Exploitation Coverup

You know that gif from Community? Where the guy cheerfully walks into a room holding pizza boxes, then looks around to see the room on fire and in total chaos? Well, that was me in 2023.

At least in my experience, NaNoWriMo was such a common concept among writers that many had no idea it was a nonprofit at all. They just wrote their novels in November either alone or with the support of their friends, without even going near the site. The first time I did NaNo in 2009, I’m not sure whether I used the site at all. 

(What I do know is I didn’t know what the hell I was doing and abandoned ship within a week.)

I did use it in 2010. That was the one and only time I “won”, resulting in a very weird manuscript I haven’t touched since, but think about often. It involved a Spirit Halloween, a small-town conspiracy, and serial killer tourism, and it makes about as much sense as…anything happening in the world right now.

Maybe I’ll dust it off again, but if I do, it’s more likely I’ll build it back up from scratch.

Anyway, when I rolled up to try NaNoWriMo again in 2023 with my pizza boxes, I had very little context for all the messy stuff that had been happening. All I saw was an email about halfway through the month that the forums were shutting down, saw someone else mention it was because of child grooming allegations, and backed the hell out like Homer Simpson disappearing into that hedge.

The point today is less about gory details and more about how the organization treated the kids who were reporting it, and what they did to all their teen-oriented programs in the aftermath. Now, nobody has gone to jail for anything, and I’m not a lawyer, so even though there’s evidence I’m going to throw a blanket “allegedly” up here just to be safe. Most of the following information is from interviews, saved excerpts from the forum threads, and messages from leadership.

You might remember that the Young Writer’s Program (YWP), had been a huge part of NaNoWriMo since 2005. It had its own community separate from the main NaNo site. And even before the grooming allegations came out, things weren’t going so well over there.

For YWP, the groups were run as “classrooms” by different “educators.” The only qualification to be an educator? Being over age eighteen. No background checks, no certification checks, no mandated reporter training, no nothing. So, it became a free-for-all where bullying could run rampant. And with bullying, comes bigotry—which wasn’t restricted to just the kids. Racist messages between staff members were also revealed during this time.

In addition to YWP communities, there were also forums for kids age 13–17 on the main site, one of which was called Christian Teens Together. And in that forum was someone with way too much power and free access to people they intended to abuse.

That forum moderator is called “Moderator X” on most of the reports about this event, but the primary sources (i.e., interviews with employees and volunteers) say their handle was CinnamonFridge. But apparently sharing their handle doesn’t really matter too much, because they’ve since died (or at least that’s the general consensus—they did have this weird habit of creating sock puppet accounts and killing the imaginary people attached to them off—but I’ll let you check out some of the linked material for more details because it’s super confusing). 

I’m just going to say “Mod X” because it’s easier to get out of my mouth.

Mod X, an adult, was a little too friendly with some of the teens on the site, particularly drawn toward ones who were complaining about having a hard time at home. But they also were one of the more tyrannical mods I’ve ever heard about. They implemented a “three-strikes” rule for the group, which numbered over a thousand kids. And I don’t mean three-strikes per person, I mean three strikes total—after which they threatened that they’d shut down the forums for six months.

When you’re a kid, especially a kid surviving an isolating pandemic, you form bonds with your internet friends. I mean, I’ve done the same over the past five years or so. If I lost access to a couple of my Discord servers, I’d be losing connections with people who have been there for me during some really rough times—but I’m an adult with a lot more agency over my social life than these members had.

But the real illegal thing Mod X did was link to their adult fetish site in the forums, where they basically sent the kids to interact with other predatory adults. They were also letting a lot of these predators into the actual forums to interact with the kids there too.

In May 2023, some of the kids complained to higher ups at NaNoWriMo staff about Mod X, including the acting Executive Director Kilby Blades, who had taken over a few months earlier.

The kids did not get help. After a month, nothing had been done. Except some hush-ups—at least one kid who spoke out on the forums got banned for it. Other posts and threads on the forums were hidden and frozen, and employees in the interviews I watched reported that Blades instructed them to, “Starve it of oxygen,” “it” being any conversation about abuse.

But, YWP forum members started complaining too, pointing to the culture of bullying, privacy breaches, bigotry, and some of the predatory, abusive behavior they were dealing with. The abuse was as serious as kids receiving death threats, and being exposed to different adult predators. When the kids complained about one in particular, all that happened was the threads created by that adult were taken down. There were no statements or announcements that the person had been banned, which didn’t do much to make the members feel safer.

So, In October, a month before the 2023 challenge, one of the members posted the following in what was supposed to be a Mods-only forum (which tells you something about site security):

“There is always an explosion of newbies in November, and you have children as young as 13 here. And your inaction is making the site dangerous. We are being forced to defend ourselves against something we should not be dealing with because you can’t be bothered. This is more than inaction. This is dangerous incompetence. And don’t respond to this with another ‘we’ll do better’ apology, because they never last. I’ve seen this cycle too many times. Tell us that he’s gone, that we don’t have to worry about him, and tell us what you’re doing to make sure this doesn’t happen again. And stop forcing children to be the adults in your place.”

The mods responded by giving the kids one day’s notice before closing the forum for a week.

Teens created a separate site to air their experiences where their posts couldn’t be erased, which I’ll link in the notes. These examples were far from the only ones of creepy, inappropriate, or downright illegal actions against kids. There were even allegations of sexual assaults taking place at local events. And since they were in public places like coffee shops, the volunteer MLs felt they had no power to kick anyone out, no matter what they’d done.

Now, regardless of whether I buy that excuse or not isn’t the point. The point is nobody was doing anything to help these kids or hold the adults in question accountable. So, they brought their complaints to the FBI, along with over a hundred pages of evidence. Then they brought it to the NaNoWriMo board—who was admittedly pretty removed from daily ops.

The staff and board ended up doing exactly what Mod X had threatened to do to the Christian Teens Together members. They shut the forums down, this time permanently.

The ML Exodus

A lot of MLs were quitting around that time. After all, they’d been urged to get as many local teachers and students into these forums as possible, and they understandably couldn’t stomach hanging out after what had happened.

But still others quit due to a contract NaNo HQ demanded they sign within two weeks of receipt—one that most lawyers would never let a client sign off on. The good thing about it is they stipulated background checks for all volunteers. Great. What wasn’t so great were some of the other rules.

One was that all NaNo-related communications could only take place through the site, which meant no more forums or Discords for local and regional meetups. Executive Director Kilby Blade was noted to have told employees that she didn’t understand the point of forums anyway—she believed writers’ retreats (famously an affordable option) were much more effective.

Even weirder is that the contract demanded that MLs never share information in any language but English, even though the organization spanned multiple countries. To illustrate the problem with that—in Canada, it’s the law that all official communications must be presented bilingually, in both English and French.

Last of all, the new contract placed full liability on MLs (which, for the billionth time, are volunteers) for anything that happened at their events or within their online communities. And with the way abuse had become so rampant and unpunished by actual staff or mods, that was not a risk people were willing to take.

And there’s so much, SO MUCH, more that I simply do not have the time to cover, and we’re not even to the part that people actually paid attention to!

2024 AI Statement

Good graces toward NaNoWriMo, which had already been tanking, were at their breaking point. And you’d think everything I’ve just described would do it, right? But what actually put the nail in the coffin was last year’s infamous statement on AI released on August 8, 2024. If you’ve seen any part of this already, it’s undoubtedly that statement, which I am now going to read.

“NaNoWriMo does not explicitly support any specific approach to writing, nor does it explicitly condemn any approach, including the use of AI. NaNoWriMo’s mission is to “provide the structure, community, and encouragement to help people use their voices, achieve creative goals, and build new worlds—on and off the page.” We fulfill our mission by supporting the humans doing the writing. 

[They link here to an article that no longer exists…]

“We also want to be clear in our belief that the categorical condemnation of Artificial Intelligence has classist and ableist undertones, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege.

“Classism. Not all writers have the financial ability to hire humans to help at certain phases of their writing. For some writers, the decision to use AI is a practical, not an ideological, one. The financial ability to engage a human for feedback and review assumes a level of privilege that not all community members possess.”

(ESPECIALLY WHEN FORUMS ARE SHUT DOWN)

“Ableism. Not all brains have the same abilities and not all writers function at the same level of education or proficiency in the language in which they are writing. Some brains and ability levels require outside help or accommodations to achieve certain goals. The notion that all writers “should“ be able to perform certain functions independently is a position that we disagree with wholeheartedly. There are a wealth of reasons why individuals can’t “see” the issues in their writing without help.”

(ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY’RE WORKING ON AN INACCESSIBLE WEBSITE)

“General Access Issues. All of these considerations exist within a larger system in which writers don’t always have equal access to resources along the chain. For example, underrepresented minorities are less likely to be offered traditional publishing contracts, which places some, by default, into the indie author space, which inequitably creates upfront cost burdens that authors who do not suffer from systemic discrimination may have to incur.”

(WHAT ABOUT WHEN THEY’RE BULLIED OR HARASSED IN THEIR WRITING COMMUNITIES WITH NO CONSEQUENCES?)

“Beyond that, we see value in sharing resources and information about AI and any emerging technology, issue, or discussion that is relevant to the writing community as a whole. It’s healthy for writers to be curious about what’s new and forthcoming, and what might impact their career space or their pursuit of the craft. Our events with a connection to AI have been extremely well-attended, further-proof that this programming is serving Wrimos who want to know more.”

“For all of those reasons, we absolutely do not condemn AI, and we recognize and respect writers who believe that AI tools are right for them. We recognize that some members of our community stand staunchly against AI for themselves, and that’s perfectly fine. As individuals, we have the freedom to make our own decisions.”

I mean, how do you feel about that? Particularly if you are from one of those underrepresented groups or have a “brain of different ability”?

People didn’t like that. And I’m going to be kind of charitable here to said “people”, and speculate that it drew more attention than the child exploitation issue because that was something that affected a group outsiders weren’t aware of. If you hadn’t been a dedicated NaNoWriMo person, you probably didn’t know about it. If I hadn’t been a participant for half of November 2023, I would have had no idea.

But the AI statement addressed a wider cultural phenomenon that has been the hottest conversation topic for anyone who creates art. 

Critics also speculated that this post may have had something to do with one of their sponsors, ProWritingAid, which had introduced a robust generative AI function called “Sparks.” For transparency—I did subscribe to ProWritingAid with the intent of using it as a grammar checker a while back and hadn’t really been paying attention to it until I started researc hing this. 

(To be completely honest, I’ve barely been using it. It has this weird alignment and formatting problem where, if you accept one of its edits, it inserts the change into a completely different line and sometimes into the middle of a word. And I guess I now understand why running the program uses so much RAM. I won’t be renewing my membership.) 

Regardless—that’s some egg on my face!

Pandemonium ensued after that statement. Authors Daniel José Older and Maureen Johnson stepped down from the board—Older doing it in a Tweet that added a “Never use my name in your promo again in fact never say my name at all and never email me again.” Writers who had previously written bestselling novels during NaNoWriMo, like Erin Morgenstern, author of The Night Circus, condemned the statement. Ellipsus dropped out as a sponsor, which is how I found out about them, so yay for that!

NaNo HQ issued a retraction, kinda, in September 2024 that read as follows:

“Taking a position of neutrality was not an abandonment of writers’ legitimate concerns about AI. It was an acknowledgment that NaNoWriMo can’t maintain a civil, inclusive community if we allow selective intolerance. We absolutely believe that AI must be discussed and that its ethical use must be advocated-for. What we don’t believe is that NaNoWriMo belongs at the forefront of that conversation. That debate should continue to thrive within the greater writing community as technologies continue to evolve.

“We apologize that our original message was unclear and seemingly random. Our note on ableism and classism was rooted in the desire to point out that, for people in certain circumstances, some forms of AI can be life-changing. We certainly don’t believe those with concerns about AI to be classist or ableist. Not being more careful about our wording was a bad decision on our part.”

A little bit of a sorry-not-sorry there, but either way the damage was done. The good will that nonprofits rely upon to stay afloat was completely shattered.

On March 31, 2025, Kilby Blades posted a Powerpoint presentation on YouTube, discussing the organization’s dwindling finances, the results of so-called community vitriol, and letting everyone know that NaNoWriMo was no more.

So now what?

NaNoWriMo started out as an idea, and that idea was driven by a spirit of fun and community and creative expression. Some people are trying to keep the party going. 

Funny enough, ProWritingAid has created a clone of NaNo called “Novel November”, which definitely isn’t anti-AI. I did poke around in there, and it’s very similar to late-stage NaNo in that it offers rewards, badges, communities divided up by genres and interests, and a slew of sponsors and partners (former HPS guest Ellipsus is notably not on there).

Ellipsus did post some “preptober” templates that people can use to prepare to write a novel in November. There’s only one day left, sure, but that means you STILL HAVE TIME.

Some, “content creator” types are running challenges within their own communities, paid and unpaid, as are a few other writer-related businesses. I’ve noticed several have knocked about ten to twenty-thousand words off the 50k goal, and that’s probably more realistic for the way life is right now for most people.

But Chris Baty, who started the challenge in 1999, hasn’t lost love for it. He put up a site called “NaNo 2.0” for people who want to do the challenge on their own terms. Instead of accounts, wordcounters, groups and additional programs, there’s instructions, suggestions, and a link to a Bluesky account with about 400 members.

But you don’t really need any of this stuff to write a Novel in November. You can do it alone. You can do it with a couple of your friends, or you can make it last all year.

Content, Community, and Capitalism

So, what can we learn from this twenty-five year saga? How do we make sense of it?

First, it’s not enough to just throw out a “because capitalism”, because even though that’s a big part of it, it’s reductive. Individual egos, cynical leadership, and authoritarian mindsets are definitely ingredients. A general culture disrespect for and disbelief of children is as well. But it’s tough to argue that money wasn’t a driver for a lot of poor decisions that were made throughout this story.

So in a time where nonprofits are getting widely defunded, while the cost of living is rising faster than salaries can keep up, it’s a great time to see what we can do cooperatively. Especially when it comes to things that bring us joy.

Nonprofits aren’t corporations, but trying to manage a de-centralized movement like NaNoWriMo using one centralized organization is kind of indicative of how we approach creativity and community these days. Small communities get hurtful and messy, and terrible things can happen there—that’s also clear from this story. Mods in small groups, even ones who *aren’t* predators, can be power-hungry jerks or just make hurtful mistakes. But trying to engineer hundreds of small groups means these conflicts have the potential to hideously spiral into harmful patterns and then spur massive coverups.

And when corporations *do* come into play, we run the risk of dehumanizing writers in a way that we’re all too familiar with by now.

Your art becomes *content*. Your value comes from your ability to produce content. And that way of looking at it will suck the creativity out of you. And when everything is based on the anxiety of competition, it might even tempt some folks to turn to generative AI, even when the the goal of writing a novel in November is just to create a first draft, not complete and sell an entire book.

You’re not there to finish a book. You’re not there to source an entire project team for your self-publishing journey. You’re not there to make yourself into a product to be bought.

All you need to do is write. You can worry about the other stuff later.

Sound Credits

Sources

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