It was very weird this week to be struck by the sudden realization that I hadn’t spent October thinking through and planning for another round of NaNoWriMo. Up until last year, I had spent almost every October for the last twenty years that way, deciding what I wanted to spend 30 days writing at least 50,000 words on.
My first NaNo was in 2003. My last was in 2023. I had a good run–“winning” more than I lost–and did Camp NaNo over the years here and there, too, in the spring and summer. After a while I didn’t participate in the online community as much, but I did manage to go to a few write-ins in graduate school and then while working through my second bachelor’s degree. It was wonderful and in some ways, I miss those quiet gatherings, the sprints, the coffee and snacks and laughter, the talking through sticky points together and sharing whatever insane yarn we’d come up with for that year.
I think the greatest gift that NaNo ever gave me was the permission to write fast, to write hard, to not worry about whether it was good just that it was down on paper–the permission to be wildly creative without worrying too much. When you have friends writing about sapphic werewolves and alien invasions, you learn those kinds of things.
NaNo was never about writing the great American novel, at least not for me and not for most of the folks I ever interacted with. It was about practicing a craft and telling the stories that were in us, about the actual work of writing and creativity. Even if you didn’t win, you learned something, you got some words toward the million words of practice toward mastery. In a lot of ways, it was magic.
Then the magic died.
It’s weird to think that it’s gone, now, but the writing was on the wall last year with everything that happened. Like for so many things, the stance on AI was the final nail in the coffin. It’s sad, but you also consider that most of the original staff was now gone, and the original magic that was bound up in the whole enterprise was fading.
But that won’t stop a lot of us from settling in this November, as the days grow short and the nights get cold (at least in the northern hemisphere) to work on something new, something old, to write hard and see where our creativity can take us.
I’m no exception. I’ve set myself a challenge and some of what I produce will land here and more will be on my Patreon. There won’t be winning, not this year, not the way there has been before. But there will still be something.
So here’s to the Novembers past and the November yet to come. May it be a creative, magical one.
