NaNoWriMo

» see nanowrimo.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

I have never tried to write a novel and have no plans to start. NaNoWriMo belonged to people with a drawer full of first chapters and a specific kind of stubbornness about finishing one, which is a population I am not part of and never was. What I can say about it from outside is that for twenty-five Novembers it was the only place on the internet where an enormous number of people agreed to be bad at something together on purpose, and that turns out to be much harder to build than it sounds.

The rule was one sentence long. Write 50,000 words of a novel between the first of November and the thirtieth, which comes to 1,667 words a day, and do not stop to fix anything. Quality was explicitly not the point; the entire pedagogical trick was to set a target high enough that self-editing becomes impossible, on the theory that most unfinished novels die of revision rather than of bad prose. Finish and you were a winner. There was no prize.

Chris Baty ran the first one in July 1999 in the San Francisco Bay Area with 21 people. He shifted it to November the following year, in his words "to more fully take advantage of the miserable weather", and 140 signed up for that one with 29 finishing. Then it compounded: 5,000 in 2001, 14,000 in 2002 after NPR and the CBS Evening News picked it up, and on upward for two decades until 412,295 people in 671 regions across six continents took part in 2022. Participants called themselves Wrimos. Volunteers called Municipal Liaisons organized the local write-ins, which is how a word count became a thing you did in a cafe with strangers. Sara Gruen drafted Water for Elephants this way, and Erin Morgenstern built The Night Circus across three separate Novembers.

It incorporated as a 501(c)(3) in 2006 under the name The Office of Letters and Light, based in Berkeley. Baty handed over to Grant Faulkner in 2012. The money never really worked. The last filed year showed $1,158,793 of revenue against $1,339,741 of expenses, and the organization ran short in four of the six years before the end. Grants and corporate sponsorships fell away. So did the monthly donors.

~ the record ~

~ the forums ~

In November 2023 a group of users published evidence of alleged child exploitation on the NaNoWriMo forums involving a moderator who supervised minors. The organization's first instinct was to close threads and ban the people raising it from the public moderation record, which converted a safeguarding failure into a censorship story running alongside it.

The board published a response on 15 November 2023 and a second one on minors' safety afterward. Its own findings were that staff had a history of overpromising and underdelivering, that there was a lack of transparency and community accountability, and that far too few people were doing far too much. The forums went read-only during the crisis and never opened again. A community whose entire product was the community had just deleted the part where people talked to each other.

~ the ai statement ~

On 2 September 2024 Samantha Cole at 404 Media reported the answer NaNoWriMo had quietly posted to its own FAQ about artificial intelligence. The sentence was: "We believe that to categorically condemn AI would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology." It went on to argue that not all brains have the same abilities and that some writers need outside help to reach certain goals.

There is a real accessibility argument buried in there. It was made to the single audience least likely to hear it that autumn, by an organization whose entire premise was that you personally produce 50,000 words, and with a generative-AI writing tool listed among its sponsors. Daniel José Older resigned from the Writers' Board the same day and Maureen Johnson left the Young Writers Program board. Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Erin Morgenstern publicly stepped away from the brand. The sponsor Ellipsus withdrew. NaNoWriMo apologized, adopted what it called a position of neutrality on AI, then deleted the original post.

~ what the wrimos did next ~

Kilby Blades, a former board president serving as interim executive director, announced the shutdown on 31 March 2025 in a video titled "The State of NaNoWriMo". He named the financial position and what he called community vitriol, and later described the closure to Publishers Weekly as a logical outcome of longstanding circumstances rather than a salacious tale of scandal. The farewell put it more plainly: "This is not the ending that anybody wanted or planned. And, believe us, if we could hit the delete button and rewrite this last chapter, we would." The other line worth keeping is the diagnosis. There is no shortage of writers who want to do this. What defeated the organization was that building a community and sustaining one are different problems.

November did not notice much. The challenge was never technically dependent on the organization, since the rule fits in a sentence and the word counter is arithmetic, so the regional groups that had been meeting for fifteen years carried on under new names with new spreadsheets and new Discord servers. What died was the infrastructure around it: the profiles, the pep talks from working authors, the official validator, the twenty-five years of forum threads.

~ the parking lander ~

The site went dark some time in the summer of 2025. The last capture of the working application is from 27 May and by mid-August the address was serving a GoDaddy parking page, which is what it serves today. The forums subdomain is gone and the blog does not resolve at all.

The registration tells the odder story. Somebody registered nanowrimo.org on 3 November 2001. That was two years after the first event and two days into that year's November. It was last renewed on 12 August 2026 and now runs to 3 November 2030. Whoever holds it has paid to keep a dead writing charity's address parked for another four years, which is longer than the organization managed to fund itself.

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