It’s been a while. Apologies. But I’m back.

Today, my partner read something from Medium ( https://medium.com/behind-the-words/rip-nanowrimo-df08ae8995cd ) about the closing down of NaNoWriMo. My immediate thought was: “It can’t be true,” but on reflection, and as a one-time devotee of the challenge, I was not surprised. Yes, I did it almost every year since 2003, I’ve written books on it ( https://gerald-hornsby.com/nanowrimo-2020/ ) and even delivered workshops on it to other writers. But lately… well, not so much.

Why did it close? A series of scandals, issues, problems, call them what you will caused a lot of reputational damage. But the main reason was lack of funding over many years. The organisation’s interim executive director Kilby Blades, provides the full story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TR6NnjgeIIY 

When the challenge first came to my attention (as I said, in 2003) it sounded like a fun idea. I was always up for a writing challenge, and who wouldn’t be attracted by a National Novel Writing Month? 50,000 words during the calendar month of November, each year. No prizes for completion (other than a natty downloadable PDF certificate), and a chance to blow the cobwebs from your writing.

Chris Baty first created it in 1999 in San Francisco with just 21 people. At its height, there were over a quarter of a million writers signed up. To be honest, as a Brit, I found the American-style razzamatazz a bit… too much, you know? Most of my compatriots were young women, which always made me feel a little awkward, if I’m honest, and at the meetups, quizzes and social events, I felt like the proverbial square peg.

The one HUGE positive from this was when I met my now partner, https://anitabellibooks2020.wordpress.com/  and http://www.anitabelli.com/ through NaNoWriMo. The year was 2013, she had just returned from Spain, and had joined a local NaNo group. There, she had seen a post from me about self-publishing – something she was interested in, and something I had been doing and seemed knowledgable about. We arranged to get together at a NaNo writing meetup in Chelmsford. We spoke for a long time, and discussed our writing careers and what self-publishing could offer.

At the time of writing, we’ve now been together for six-and-a-half years.

Back to writing. Over 20 years, I’ve written nearly 1 million words under the NaNoWriMo banner. Alas, most of those things were unpublishable. And this is one of the problems with something like NaNo. It’s just too damned fast, and yes, you may get 50,000 words, but the whole product, far from being a novel, needs a serious redrafting and editing before it could be considered a viable story – at least, that’s what I found. And that, dear reader, was too much of a mammoth task for a scatterbrain like me, because there was always a better and more fully-fleshed novel idea in the back of my head, ready to go.

Every year, the same. Fifty thousand words, and a ‘novel’ to put away until I could face beating it into some sort of shape.

Don’t get me wrong – there have been some great successes along the way for others – writers who used NaNo to Get The Novel Written, and then went on to publishing success. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, Water For Elephants by Sara Bruen, The Beautiful Land by Alan Averill, Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell, Wool by Hugh Howey, and The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer are just a few examples. 

In recent years, I have moved away from speed writing a novel in a month. After I had built up a heap of 37 (yes, THIRTY SEVEN) Works-In-Progress – of NaNo novels and other works – I needed to sort myself out. With the massive help of a local writers’ group and a stern talking-to from myself (and, it must be said, with the discovery of the Save The Cat method of story construction – https://savethecat.com/  ) I have, since 2018, successfully published eight full-length novels.

Now, I no longer need NaNoWriMo to get me to put words on paper, or to give me the figurative kick up the backside to actually sit down at my laptop and DO SOMETHING.

I shall miss it. In many respects, it changed my life. And have many, many fond memories, not the least of which occurs when I look across at my beautiful partner. NaNoWriMo brought us together. 

So I bid farewell, and adieu, to the writing challenge in the same way I say farewell to an old rocker who shuffles off this mortal coil. Man, you were great in your prime, but recently… not so much. Thanks for the memories.