Another November means another NaNoWriMo. To start, I want to say: spoiler alert! I’ve done it again. November 30, 2024 marks another 50k words down in my novel, which has now passed the 120k word mark.

Am I proud? Hell yeah. It was a really long process, and I didn’t write that much in the eleven months that passed between one NaNoWriMo to the next. That meant that I felt a little out of my element going in, but at least I had the foresight to at least open the doc before the first day so that I could reorient myself. What was I writing again? What chapter are we on? What’s supposed to happen next?

Writer’s block is weird that way. I ended NaNoWriMo ‘23 at a weak point. I was in the middle of a transition, with no clear scene for me to work off of. It was a whole lot of character development that I needed to write but could not decide how to. There were scenes that needed to get done that I couldn’t get to, simply because I couldn’t figure out how to connect one scene to the next without feeling as though I was dragging myself through mud. So when I finished the month, it would be months before I could bring myself to open the doc again, and many months before I could write a few paragraphs, much less an entire scene.

So, I knew I had a challenge this year. And I’m a perfectionist. I hate leaving things undone, and I’ll painstakingly agonize over every word as I write until I’m at least somewhat satisfied with how the sentences flow and what the characters are saying. Does it fit their personality? Would they actually do this?

And that was the problem. Let’s be serious. I’m writing the first draft of a novel, and it’s the first time I’m writing something of this length in… ever. I have never written anything this long before. Do I logically think I could write a Pulitzer prize winner on the first draft? No, of course not. Does that stop me from trying? Also no.

It’s two very different things to recognize this fact about myself and to actually do something to fix it. I spent the few months leading up to this November anxiously trying to get myself into the headspace of a “first draft writer.” We’re allowed to skip entire scenes, leave comments to remind ourselves of what we need to work on later, and keep barreling on so we don’t lose steam. The entire point of a first draft is to make it exist, not to ship it out to publishers.

Realistically, it will take me another year to finish the first draft if I keep the pace I’ve been going at. And it will take me years to edit and to write a second draft. And even more years to write a third draft. Rinse and repeat. And from there, if I decide I want to publish, it will take me many more years.

That’s reality. And recognizing this made NaNoWriMo so much easier.

So I wrote a lot of “”’s this year. And left a lot of “BLANK”s when I didn’t want to stop and come up with a name for a new character or city. And when I say a lot, I mean a lot. There’s entire chunks of time (in story) that are missing, where I have mentally filled in the gaps of how the characters have developed in that time. And that’s okay. I will come back to it later, once I am done with this draft.

It’s frustrating to admit, but yeah, I made a lot of progress this year by not writing.

But isn’t that so satisfying?

I could write a whole novel (as scary as that is) about how I feel about NaNoWriMo as a program. I love it as a way to encourage myself to write, and their pretty graphs and awards do wonders to give me unimaginable amounts of motivation. But unfortunately, in the final few days of NaNoWriMo this year, I learned that the team is what they call “AI neutral.”

There’s a time and a place for AI. Like in cancer research. But in all honesty, I do not believe there are many other situations where AI is genuinely useful. Generative artwork? Absolutely not. Chat bots? Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I like Google just fine. And it’s not just that I think there are better alternatives. All things considering, AI is fantastically helpful sometimes, and I admit I do use it when I absolutely cannot find what I need on Google.

What I hate, though, is the “hidden” impact AI has on us. Stealing data from people, especially artists and creatives, to train their models without permission. Draining the environment of resources to power servers that run the models. The humans behind training data who are underpaid and not recognized. These things weigh heavily on me when I think of AI and whenever I see a piece of AI generated art.

So when I heard that NaNoWriMo is “AI neutral”, I could not help but finish this month with a sour taste in my mouth. As a creative community, NaNoWriMo was the last place I expected to be welcoming of AI works. It stings a little, of course, to have spent dozens of hours writing scene after scene, training myself to push past my too high standards, just to find that an AI generated work could do all that in a few hours, or maybe a day, with barely any human intervention.

What’s the point of that? “Writing” without emotion or human thought? What message could an AI come up with that isn’t an idea stolen from other writers? Was it Shakespeare that it trained off of, or maybe Agatha Christie? Or was it me? How many gallons of water did it require to generate 50k words? How much of that water are we getting back?

Anyways. Aside from doom spiraling about AI, I spent time thinking of what I wanted to do next year. I don’t think that I can, with a clear conscious, go back to using NaNoWriMo’s site. I have already found a few alternatives, including TrackBear, which I’ve been using a little since November ended. And, of course, I’m a software engineer, so I have the means to create what I want to keep from NaNoWriMo myself.

So, when in November 2025, I am no longer a user on the NaNoWriMo site, know that this is the reason why.