I have always loved books, always read, I have even made up my own stories in some form or fashion for longer than I can remember. That has naturally changed and grown alongside me. Accepting the National Novel Writing Month challenge to write fifty thousand words in thirty days, and completing it, is the first time I realized that I could write books that others would buy and read. I have accepted, and met, this challenge for five years.

The non profit organization of the same name, which proposed this challenge, is now shutting down. I watched an official video announcing so this week, wherein they explained why; you can watch it yourself if you want, I’ll put a link at the bottom. I don’t know if I suggest you read the comments or not. They provide you with a wider range of opinions, with a balance to the official release, but some are melodramatic. The clearest example is a comment about the video being posted on April Fool’s day – scroll up, it wasn’t that date. That comment is instantly discredited in my eyes, and the others tainted.

From this video, I learned there’s a good reason some colleges offer Non-Profit Administration as an entire major. By the sound of it, NaNoWriMo’s downfall started a few years before this rough patch, and the officials didn’t notice. I wasn’t affected by the events which spawned the controversies; I didn’t use the forums. I used the website’s word counter tools and signed in to my regional group chap – which was apparently not under NaNoWriMo’s authority. It had their official logo, and some of their (unvetted, but mine were awesome) volunteers running it.

NaNoWriMo is closing. The reasons the video gave make sense to me. I believe mistakes were made by their people. I believe the community both did a lot to support them, and could have done more – donated more or demanded more transparency earlier or pointed out things were missing – and would have done more if they realized it was needed. I do not believe either NaNo officials or the WriMo community could have saved the organization alone; no matter who got it started, NaNoWriMo as a whole needed both parts to do better. Maybe they couldn’t, and that’s fine too.

The idea, the challenge, the camaraderie of tackling that challenge together, is out there. People may condemn me for taking a side (whichever side they perceive that to be) or for not taking a side (which is true), but all of the information I have about the entire course of events is so biased every which way that I can trust very few parts of it. Some people say the organization was great; obviously not entirely, they were boycotted en masse. Some say they are criminal-hosting bigots; those topics invite the loud and outraged to rant.

I say, I’m tired. I don’t want to direct the energy in to the research it would take for me to determine who I believe is right, just to support a moot point. NaNoWriMo is shutting down. We can’t change that. The challenge they set and all the writing groups created because of it (and because of boycotting it) will remain. People wrote and read books together before them, and will after, and so will I. The most I might do is send a message asking if the code to their website’s word counter could be made opensource, because I liked their tools.

I will, for this sixth year in a row, attempt to write 50k words in the 30 days of November.

The link to the referenced video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TR6NnjgeIIY