After hearing about the controversy regarding grooming minors and admins not doing anything about it on the National Novel Writing Month, I decided to never try NaNoWriMo ever again. I deleted my account and I am disgusted about what has been going on.
If you want to read even more about what is going on, I recommend Raven Oak’s blog post “The Fall of the House of NaNoWriMo?” It’s one of the more insightful posts covered on the subject.
I first tried NaNoWriMo in 2010, when I was doing my first year of grad school. It gave me a taste of how not only difficult it is to write a 50,000 in just a month but that the month of November is packed with its own unique set of obstacles like early holiday shopping, trying to finish a semester, and other challenges. Yes, people have written novels during NaNoWriMo and were published, but it was possible some of them re-examined their work and did some polishing before getting their books out there for people to read. I did this not just to see if I could generate new ideas but also to join like-minded individuals also taking a stab at 50,000 novels.
Those days are over. The fact the abuse to minors happened for years and the fact there were threats against NaNoWriMo from the moderator accused of abuse compelled me to delete my account.
I’ll still continue work on Shadow of the Ravenwoman. Yes, I’ll keep count of word count. And draft versions. This is what I want to focus on more than what is going on with NaNoWriMo.
– Auctor
One Page of Misery 