NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month. It was started in 1999 and grew into a far-reaching event over the next 25 years. To put it briefly, it was a personal challenge to write 50,000 words in 30 days during the month of November. Signing up on the website gave participants somewhere to track their progress, earn goodies for winning (mostly downloadable badges and printable certificates, as well as discounts on some writing- or publishing-related sites), and a huge community of like-minded people, cheering each other on. The main event took place in November, with smaller “camp” events in April and July in later years.

I participated in NaNoWriMo for the first time in 2007, and proceeded to participate every year but 3 (skipping 2008, 2010, & 2011) up until my last, in 2021. I would get excited in September, start planning in October, and then start writing like mad at midnight on November 1. I was a HUGE fangirl. I told everyone I knew about it and tried to get people to participate (whether they thought of themselves as writers or not). After I started this blog in 2014, I proceeded to blog about NaNo a LOT. Every year except 2016 (a rough NaNo for many reasons), I blogged my way through the month, posting daily about my word count and the story I was writing. I’ve also posted a lot of other things about NaNo, including a series of posts giving tips and tricks for getting through the month and even prompts to help someone come up with an idea of what to write. All told, there are almost 500 posts on my blog that have the NaNoWriMo tag—out of around 1900 total posts, that’s about 1/4 of this blog! The point is that NaNoWriMo was a HUGE part of my life.

Then came the screeching end for me. I didn’t gradually drop off, find myself without time to participate, or just run out of ideas to write about. It was a difficult, painful, sad decision, not to be too dramatic about it. It came when the people who ran the event overstepped in a big way. In May of 2022, they sent out an email lamenting the overturning of Roe v. Wade and encouraging everyone to donate money to pro-abortion organizations. I’d always known that the folks behind NaNo were very liberal, and for anyone who hasn’t read enough of my blog to know my own stance, I am a Bible-believing Christian. I was able to ignore some of the progressive stances they were taking, but this one was too much to look past. I felt that continuing to participate and support these people would be turning a blind eye to the encouragement of the murder of innocents.

Though I still didn’t decide immediately to put an end to my participation in NaNoWriMo. At first, I took to social media to see if there was any other outcry in response to this email. And indeed, I did see one or two people comment on the posts that NaNoWriMo had put out with the same information about their pro-abortion stance, those comments very politely voicing unhappiness at not only the general content of the email, but also a specific note that I had missed. From the email/post:

“We (NaNoWriMo) have made an organizational contribution to [the National Network of Abortion Funds’s official ActBlue page].”

Understand that NaNoWriMo was a non-profit organization. Their money came from donations and merchandise sales. I am not a wealthy person by any means, but I had bought a t-shirt every year that I participated (in some cases, 2 shirts), purchased posters, notebooks, a hoodie, and even outright donated a couple of times. This meant that they had taken the money given to them by fans and participants (including plenty of anti-abortion people just like me) that was meant to promote literacy and run this awesome program every year and used it for something completely unrelated to their sphere of influence and worse yet, something that they had every reason to believe a good chunk of the people who gave them that money would not support.

I added my comment to at least one of these posts stating that I was displeased as well and that I might not be able to participate in NaNoWriMo anymore…and then within a day or so of commenting, I went back to the post to find that the comments against their post had been deleted. They made it clear that they didn’t want to discuss our issues with their misuse of our donations. And that’s what clenched my decision to not participate ever again. I couldn’t support an organization that would so blatantly disregard the beliefs and concerns of its participants and donators.

When November came that year, I mourned my loss. NaNoWriMo had been a huge part of my life for over 10 years. I’d won every single year I’d participated (just winning means reaching 50k words) and many years I’d written 25k-50k more than the required words. I finished many first drafts thanks to NaNo, a couple of which I’ve gone on to polish and publish. I pushed myself in so many different ways, learning something about myself as a writer, storyteller, time manager, or something else every single year. I had moments of epic triumph and moments of disappointment. I met people that I never otherwise would have and promoted other people’s artistic outputs related to NaNoWriMo. Fall used to be my favorite time of year, with NaNoWriMo giving way to Thanksgiving and then Christmas. I was jazzed for months!

A few days ago, I learned that NaNoWriMo no longer exists. It came to an end earlier this year. I’m not interested in getting into all of the whys and wherefores, though there are a lot of places out there where this information (possibly with varying degrees of accuracy) can be found, but overall, it appears that the people behind NaNoWriMo made a lot of poor decisions, which sadly doesn’t surprise me. I do wish I’d known about this sooner (I don’t know why I stopped receiving emails, since I didn’t close my account and certainly didn’t make waves in the corporate offices when I stopped participating) so I could have maybe taken some screenshots of the graphs, badges, updates, etc. from my account on the site, though thankfully I chronicled a lot of my participation on both Facebook and this blog. Overall, though I’m sad for other Wrimos, the closure doesn’t really affect me much. If anything, makes it a little less sad that I won’t be thinking of NaNo going on next month without me.

I did try to do my own personal challenge the first few Novembers after this happened, but it was never the same. Of course, that’s partly because my writing work in the last few years has been all revision and not much new writing. (To be honest, I had run out of first-draft ideas and wasn’t sure what I was going to write for 2022’s NaNo anyway.) But I do sometimes challenge myself to work for a certain amount of time every day in November. Now that NaNoWriMo is gone, though, it seems to have opened the door for other organizations to run their own similar novel-writing events.

For anyone who might be interested, I have come across one so far, but I’m sure there are plenty more out there: Novel November Note: this site seems to be selling some kind of product for writers, but it is not my intention to endorse their product, about which I know nothing. I may try it this or another one this November, because I have been itching to write something new, but I’d have to do so alongside revising the book I’m close to being ready to publish. Combined with having no idea what I’d write (I am not a pantser) it doesn’t seem feasible, but I haven’t given up yet. It’s just nice to know that this is something I might be able to do again someday, even if not this year.

Are you a past Wrimo? Whether yes or no, do you think you might participate in some kind of novel-writing challenge this November?