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NaNoWriMo is Dead to Me: Better Late Than Never

By Anne Kelly Leave a comment

This is the summer that I decided nothing would stop me from getting a new novel draft saved on the external hard drive. I have a great idea. I’ve accumulated lots of material. The perfect title even came to me.

Then, I went to NaNoWriMo’s website to prepare for Camp NaNo, and the website was dead.

No, it’s still live; you can update your account with a new project. It’s just dead—nobody is there talking about their latest projects. Very few people have been there since November 2023.

So, I started looking around for why the National Novel Writing Month website is a ghost of itself. After NaNoWriMo last fall, everyone who volunteered or worked for the organization quit or was sacked. The forums are there, but no one is posting or replying.

Finally, Twitter got my answer. There were tons of tweets about why people quit NaNoWriMo.

There was a grooming incident involving minors. The only way anyone found out about it was because they used the website last November to write a draft. Since then, NaNoWriMo has been tight-lipped, and the only way to find out what happened was to find other writers who participated in the annual event. Now I know why no one is there. NaNoWriMo is dead for many writers. Starting today, NaNoWriMo is dead to me, too.

I’m still going to work on my novel draft. I waited until today for Camp NaNo to begin, but I know how this works, and I have the tools without NaNoWriMo. I even found some tweets offering other websites that provide the same tools and none of the bullshit.

NaNoWriMo is dead to me.

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When You Stop Writing Because You’re Reading

By Anne Kelly Leave a comment

Not sure if other writers do this, but I know I do. I will start researching something for my writing … and before I know it I  get sucked into reading EVERYTHING I can get my hands on before I get back to writing.

So far I’ve read just about everything I could find online, bought two books and really want to buy a third except the $25 price tag is making me hesitate. Not the first time for something like this to happen. I do this ALL THE TIME. I let one of my drafts sit on my hard drive for far too long because of the sudden obsession to read whatever I could find before writing another word.

Is this a problem, or a part of the writing process?

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Some Thoughts About Exit ‘167’ On Northbound US 131

By Anne Kelly Leave a comment

North of Tustin but just south of the rest stop near Cadillac on northbound US 131, a blue sign beckons to motorists that accommodations are available from three hotels if they exit the highway using the off ramp numbered 167. A curious anomaly, because the Tustin exit on US 131 is numbered 168 and miles south of this sign.

You can’t help but wonder, is this elusive exit 167 like platform 9 and 3/4, and one must ram the sign at full-speed to exit US 131 and get to these hotels?

Or perhaps this is the route to the anti Hotel California: You can check in any time you like, if you can find it.

Perhaps like Brigadoon exit 167 only appears once every hundred years, and if you don’t vacate your hotel room by the 11 am checkout, you’re stuck there forever. What about the people who managed to find exit 167? Did they find an elusive spring of immortality and now live like the Tuck family?

Maybe it’s somewhere over the rainbow. and you have to ride a tornado to get to the three hotels listed as being available at off ramp 167.

Or it could be none of these things but instead a clever nod to Eris, Goddess of Chaos, by the Michigan Department of Transportation. After all, the numerology for 167 is obvious: 1+6+7=14, and 1+4=5. Discordians occasionally look for signs from Eris when they randomly need a Discordian oracle.

Despite closely looking for it when passing by the sign, exit 167 has yet to reveal itself. Every morning it’s the the rest stop and then exit 176, one of four exits to the town of Cadillac.

But that elusive fifth exit 167, north of exit 168 … maybe today will be the day.