mistressofmuses

Yeah, pretty deeply disappointed in NaNoWriMo's decision to embrace generative AI as a valid "writing" "option." Also not a fan of their attempt to guilt trip about it via misapplied social justice concepts.

Sure, there are concerns about ableism and privilege surrounding writing and publishing! Generative AI does not address those inequalities. Generative AI is built on the theft of works by the people who did actually write, and it appeals to *statistical likelihood* rather than any sense of true creativity (another place in which it can exacerbate issues of inequality.) Plenty of people have said more and better about that aspect of it.

Ultimately, putting in a prompt to the generative AI of your choice and having it spit out 50000 words is deeply not the same as writing 50000 words yourself. The idea that it's being treated like it is is... garbage.

For the record, I didn't have much of an issue with their previous stance, which was basically "this challenge is done on the honor system, so it's not like we can police the use of AI any more than we can enforce any of the other rules. It'd make the challenge itself pretty pointless though, so why bother?"

Because sure, people have always cheated: you can copy paste the same word 50000 times if you want to, or you can just straight up lie and say you wrote when you didn't. They don't even have a "verification" for the words written any longer*, so you can easily just lie about how much you wrote and still "win." The only person who would know would be you.

(*As a side note, there's been some sort-of scaremongering about this now being a scam to steal participants' work to feed into an AI training set, but the verification where you paste in your work to validate your wordcount hasn't been a thing for years. It's purely honor-system based on how many words you self-report having written. So as garbage as I think this move is, it ISN'T a scheme to steal your writing.)

So yes, cheating has always been possible, but this is the first time the organization has basically said that yes, any type of cheating you want to do (because that IS what having an AI "write" a novel for you is) is equally valid as... actually participating, and actually struggling to get that 50k.

The whole tone of the challenge has always seemed, to me, to be pressure... but not too much. Writing that much is a LOT, and it IS hard, and it's meant to be! But it's also never been about winning at all costs; it's been about building up habits, making progress, finding community, pushing past the inner critic and over-editor that inhibits your ability to get words on the page, allowing yourself to prioritize writing and see how much you can get done when you do. Ideally, you find positives through the act of trying to reach that goal, even if you don't win.

I've done NaNoWriMo MANY times. I've "won" several of those times, and I have not "won" several of those times. I haven't ever gotten a ready-to-publish novel out of the challenge, but I HAVE gotten good things out of it in the past! I've gotten 50k done on a WIP, or I've gotten a crappy first draft that highlighted what *didn't* work about the idea and needed future reworking, or I've gotten to at least make progress on something that had stagnated. In fairness, I've also had years that didn't yield any long-term positives, where I came away from the month dissatisfied with an idea I'd previously been excited for, and fighting burnout for too long afterwards.
In addition to the big NaNoWriMo November challenge, I've also participated in many many of the lower-pressure "camp" events, where you can set your own writing or editing goals, and those have often helped me to push through and make progress on things I've been struggling with. I even made my own non-official-event-related goal one month and used the site to track progress on it.
And even way back as a kid I did attend a couple of their young writer events, and while it didn't lead to me being a precocious young author or anything, I felt fondly toward those events.

Having them say "it's fine not to really participate, you can still win by cheating, and maybe you're the jerk if you think that's not in the spirit of the challenge!" defies all those supposed positives of the journey itself and all, and... welp, I'm just not about that.

So I won't be participating in NaNo again, which is a shame, because it IS something I've done almost every year for somewhere around a decade, now.

It's also true that this isn't the first major controversy, and it's really not even the most serious. Last year there were the allegations of grooming by one of the mods on the all-ages forum, because there was no real oversight on said forum, and they took advantage of that. And that is some way worse shit! But I did honestly hope they were learning from that, and coming back with better protections for community members, so was willing to give them the space to try and fix those problems and make sure it couldn't happen again.

This is not "there was a bad actor that we didn't do enough to stop, and now we need to do what we can to fix the system that let it happen." This is "we are completely pivoting away from the purpose and intent of our organization in a deeply insulting way."

I was a bit on the fence about whether I'd be participating in it this year anyway, because I have some writing goals I'm still clawing through for the moment. If I could get to the point where something was ready for it, I was hoping to maybe use it to kickstart progress on something, since my most optimistic goal is currently to get something completed by earlyish next year. So a bit of a bummer, but I think I'll have alternative options if I want them.

I have seen quite a few replacement challenges already being discussed. There's a novella challenge with a 30k goal that I've seen some people expressing interest in. Several mentions have been made of NaNo municipal liaisons "keeping the discord server in the divorce" and choosing to repurpose the local groups into rogue writing groups, though I haven't seen any actual examples of that yet. (I never got into my local group; one of the main MLs went to the same school I did, but my long-time roommmate apparently had weird beef with her, lol.) Lots of people have shared links to various project trackers to help with tracking wordcounts or other goals, which was largely what I did find most helpful about NaNo, so I'll probably look into those and see if I can find one I like.

We went on a really lovely hike today, enjoying this unseasonably warm day. It was beautiful, and I'm really glad we got to go be outside for a few hours. (There will be pictures later, but I haven't sorted through them yet.)

That does mean that I didn't succeed in any of the catching up I needed to do, but I think getting outside and moving around was the better thing to do! I wish I had another day off - I feel a bit more energized and like I *could* tackle that stuff I've fallen behind on... but now it's time to go back to my workweek where I have no time or energy. Bleh.

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We finished watching The Fall of the House of Usher, and I really enjoyed it. I'm hoping to rewatch it with Taylor - I think they'd like it, too.

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Took the dogs to the pet store yesterday and wound up getting them too much stuff. Spoiled monsters.

Bella is up to 41 lbs though, which is great! That's about the weight we were hoping to get her to. She fluctuated in the mid-30s when we got her from the shelter before we figured out her dietary problems. Because of her knees we were told *not* to let her gain any weight, and I understand the concern, but... her ribs were still prominent at that weight, and her hip bones stuck out enough that they caused discomfort for her when she'd sit, or if people pet her there. So while we don't want her much heavier than this, she's looking and moving SO much better now. She's also put on a lot of muscle - she actually has the beginnings of a butt, lol, plus her shoulders and chest are getting stronger. She looks like a proper beefy pitbull (just still small)! I am still just really blown away by how much better she looks now as compared to when we got her.

Cy has unfortunately dropped quite a bit of weight. We've upped his food intake, and his energy levels have been great the last few days, but it's upsetting how much muscle he's lost. He still seems to be doing okay otherwise, but just isn't holding weight well.

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I've got two major things to catch up on: writing the AUgust oneshots, and catching up on my habit tracking. I think the biggest issue I've been having is that both are hovering over me, and then I can't decide which to do, so I wind up doing neither. I feel like catching up on the tracking means I'm neglecting writing, but every day that I DON'T catch up on tracking is another day I have to try and reconstruct from memory. Both tasks feel like they grow to an even less-manageable size every day I fail to do them, and the indecision about which to tackle has been paralyzing me.

Sure, these are annoying minor problems to be griping about this way, but this is one of those probable-ADHD things that I HATE struggling with, because I CAN see that it's a stupid thing to be so stuck on, and it's not like any of this is high-stakes, but it is SO EXTREMELY FRUSTRATING.

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NaNoWriMo is coming up distressingly fast, and I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do for it, if anything. I feel like I'll regret it if I don't even give it a go, but I also worry about trying to tackle it without a chance to do any preparatory work, and considering how badly I've dragged on the AU fics, I don't think I'll have a chance to do anything else this month.

I'm aware that I've been battling burnout for months - for most of this year, really, though I've actually written a lot more than I'd anticipated I would this year so far. Even so, it's been in spurts, broken up with a lot of frustrating stretches of near-zero writing because I just *can't.* I don't like that feeling, and unfortunately I know that a lot of times NaNo leaves me feeling that way if I push too hard to make wordcount.

Buuuuut, I also really WANT to get excited about a project, and NaNo can be a great source of hype and enthusiasm, even if I'm not doing any of the social aspects of it. I want to write something that's just... shamelessly iddy and do my best to have FUN writing something. Not that other things haven't been fun, just... I really want to lean into writing something tailor-made as brain candy for me, lol. Then again, writing something intended to be pure id-fic for myself is a little revealing, ha, and makes me reluctant to say overmuch about it. (But I'm leaning toward a fantasy werewolf poly romance thing that I accidentally got invested in some ideas for, lol.)

I *did* declare a NaNo project for this year! It took two earlier false starts, but here we are.

After I scrapped working on the Worldhopping Fairytale Monstrosity fic (RIP), I vaguely settled on a DIFFERENT werewolf story than I did last year. This one was more fantasy genre rather than contemporary, but... eh. There's a LOT I haven't figured out about that story, and have gone back and forth between a few different ideas for, and it's... very not ready.

I picked another story idea, one that's floated around for a while. F/F romance between a grad student and a park ranger. It's got a relatively straightforward plot which I hope will be suitable for NaNo... a couple years I've tried with things that had WAY too much going on, and that tended to get messy.

My biggest concern at the moment is that I don't know if I'll be able to stretch this into 50k words, ha, because it IS pretty straightforward. Then again, my issue is usually that things get longer than intended, and by the end of NaNo I've hit 50k closer to the 2/3 or 3/4 mark of the story.

My second biggest concern is that I historically do not do well at writing when I haven't had a chance to really do much planning/an outline. In NaNo parlance, I am not a "pantser." But this year I decided so late - declaring around 1:00 on the 1st, lol - that I didn't really do any of the earlier planning work. So far that's largely been the difference between years I've "won" and years I haven't - I do well when I've set up a roadmap, and not so much when I just try to launch in. We'll see how it plays out this year!

The best thing about NaNo for me is the productivity - while I know I CAN keep track of daily wordcounts (and do) the rest of the year, it's not the same. The tracking on the site tends to help me stay productive and push me to write even on days I don't feel like it.

The worst thing... is kind of also the productivity, ha. I tend to get SUPER burned out after the month is over. I also feel like to at least some degree, it encourages some worse writing, because it IS so much about quantity over quality. I have largely made peace with the idea and necessity of shitty first drafts, and the adage about how you can't edit a blank page. Rewriting is my favorite part, anyway! But even so, I do cringe a bit when I notice myself writing a weaker, wordier sentence rather than a simpler, punchier one, just because more words is better, haha. I know I can easily go back and fix all of that, and no one else gets to even SEE this draft, and it's fine, but... oof.

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I know I need to really trim down how much time I spend on other stuff when I get home. By other stuff, I... mostly mean DW, ha. And mindless phone scrolling. Time to try and focus.

My camp NaNo has been completed!


My total wordcount (out of my initial goal of 15000.)


The progress line; the dashed line was the goal, the solid line is my actual wordcount.


I just like this one (day to day as a line graph) because it looks like a terrible heart monitor.

I'm pretty happy with having made my goal (even though I struggled the last few days.) I seemed to pick a reasonable goal, and I'm glad I did it! I'm still going to take a day or two off from writing, though. :P Gotta jump pretty much right back to it, but... maybe tomorrow.