Sometimes the broken cannot be fixed

I’m saddened, but not surprised, at the announcement that NaNoWriMo.org, the nonprofit organization that has hosted National Novel Writing Month for the past 25 years, has decided to shut down. I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo for over 15 years. It has served as inspiration to begin many of my novels, including my forthcoming new one. I try to write at least one novel per year — this past year being an exception with my health challenges. The goal of NaNoWriMo was to write 50,000 words during the month of November. The NaNoWriMo website was a place where you could record the basic details of the book you were working on and log your daily word count. You could set up groups and earn badges. It was both fun and encouraging.

What wasn’t announced until recently was the financial state of the organization. I watched the video from the acting executive director, Kilby Blades, as she explained why NaNoWriMo had to shut down. One of her comments was that the organization didn’t collect, or encourage, enough community funding. One thing that struck me is that she said most participants were under the impression that what they did on the site was free, meaning that people took part in the activities the site had to offer but didn’t provide any financial contributions. I’ve been coming to the NaNoWriMo site for over 15 years, and never have I seen anything other than a banner suggesting donations. The organization never, to my recollection, suggested membership fees or solicited annual contributions. I’ve contributed as I can, but I didn’t ever get the impression that I, and other participants, should have been donating continuously to keep the organization afloat.

The financial state of the organization has been declining, and it’s been operating in a deficit for four of the past six years. The only reason it didn’t report an operating loss in 2020 was that the leadership took out a COVID loan of $150,000, most of which hadn’t been paid back three years later. Most of the funding for the organization came from merchandising and sponsorships, instead of community donations. And the sponsorships began to seriously decline after 2023, when there were accusations that one of the moderators was grooming young participants on an offsite forum.
 
NaNoWriMo was a big supporter of young writers. Many educators provided material in their classrooms and created programs in schools to allow students to participate. The problem was the organization didn’t watch over this area closely enough. It didn’t verify that the people who said they were educators were actually educators. It didn’t even require participants or moderators to use their legal names. In fact, when the accusations came out about the problematic moderator, the organization was slow to react, and when it did finally report the case to the FBI, it couldn’t produce the accused moderator’s legal name because no one knew what it was. Even the acting executive director’s name, Kilby Blades, is her pen name, not her legal name.
 
This failure to protect young participants didn’t set well with many people. Adding to the problem is that there were forums on sites such as Discord and Facebook, created outside the organization, that used NaNoWriMo’s credentials but were in no way created or monitored by the organization. In some of these outside forums, participants were criticized and/or ridiculed. When complaints were presented to the organization, it didn’t do anything because it had no control over these outside forums. The problem is that the NaNoWriMo website hadn’t been updated in over seven years and was unable to support any inside forums like the ones created on the outside platforms. The organization admitted that technological advancements made up a very small portion of the annual budget.
 
As it became apparent that the organization was in serious financial danger, the acting director started actively looking for other similar organizations to merge with, but the organization’s precarious financial position made it a poor candidate for any kind of buyout. The director and board then started looking for sponsors who could help support the organization. When the topic of artificial intelligence came up, several AI sponsors presented their offers. The acting director, in the video announcing the NaNoWriMo shutdown, says the organization ended up turning down the sponsorships because AI went against what NaNoWriMo believes. If that’s the case, why had NaNoWriMo previously come out in support of the idea of AI-assisted writing? That stance had caused two well-known, nationally best-selling authors to resign from the NaNoWriMo Board of Directors.
 
Between the moderator issues and the fallout from AI support, the organization made the decision to shut down. As I said, I’m saddened by the news but not surprised.

But as H.G. Wells said, “If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.”

What am I going to do now? For starters, I’m not going to give up writing. I’m still going to challenge myself to complete one novel every year. I’m also going to continue with the NaNoWriMo challenge, just on a personal level instead of through the organization. I think I might even give myself two months instead of one to hit my goal. Writing 50,000 words in 30 days is a challenge in some cases, and none of my novels have ever been only 50,000 words anyway. I tend to write big books, most over 100,000 words. I think my shortest novel is around 80,000 words and my longest is over 180,000. A good middle spot for me is 100,000 words. So during the months of June and July, I’m going to challenge myself to write 100,000 words in 61 days. The daily word count comes out almost the same. The extra day in July — June and November both having only 30 days, of course — lowers the daily goal from 1,667 words to 1,640.

Of course, before I can sit down to write a novel, I need to get my office organized. Over the past year, I’ve used my office very little for anything other than a place to store things to be gone through later. My office is out of the way — a small area off the kitchen that, for the previous owners, served as an apartment for an elderly relative. There’s no door separating my office from a tiny kitchen area that was part of the apartment space, and I’ve often entertained the idea of creating a secret bookcase door leading into my office, for no other reason than I think it would be eccentric and look cool. And it is, after all, the place where I create books.
 
My office is my bubble of creativity. I took a class once on colors, and the instructor said the color blue fosters creativity and outside-the-box thinking. For this reason, I’ve always painted my home office spaces blue. Blue isn’t my favorite color — that honor goes to purple — but my blue office does seem to allow me to create amazing stories. I have so many ideas packed in my head, having not written much in this past year while undergoing cancer treatment. My energy has been devoted to recovering. But now that the hardest part of the treatment is hopefully behind me, I can get back on track with both my writing and my painting.
 
I miss creating. Creating is therapeutic for me. As Aristotle once said, “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” I use my writing to express my inmost thoughts and to deal with problems in the world my way. Every character is a part of me. There’s something about each of them that represents a quirk in my own personality. In a way, then, my characters are an extension of me. Though I’ve never created a character specifically based on me, meaning I’ve never put myself in the place of any character, each one is distinctly some little piece of me.
 
My painting allows me to express my moods with colors. I do abstract paint pouring, and each painting to me is like a Rorschach test in that you can examine one of my finished canvases 10 times and sometimes see 10 different images. On a related note, I’ve been reading up on art therapy recently, and I find the idea fascinating. I know that I almost always feel better after I finish a painting. There are some that just turn out terrible, and I end up pouring new paint over them. But even those failures can be a lesson. And the lesson is: Don’t give up. Something good can come from something bad if you allow yourself the opportunity to see it. That’s something I’ve learned in a very personal way over the past year.
 
I have in my art room a bucket full of broken glasses. I entertained the idea of using the broken pieces to create new art — to create something beautiful from something broken. That idea hasn’t come to fruition … yet. But the idea is still sitting there in my mind, and until it goes away, it’s always possible for it to become reality.

As author Lauren Oliver observed: “You don't reach points in life at which everything is sorted out for us. I believe in endings that should suggest our stories always continue.”