NaNoNoMore and the Writing Landscape
Today is November 1st and it’s weird to me that NaNoWriMo is no longer a thing. Because it was such a huge thing for so long and it makes me a bit sad that so many people won’t get a chance to try and push themselves to write 50,000 words in a month along with a zillion other wannabe writers. There was a huge energy surge of creative energy around NaNoWriMo and I’m sorry that it’s gone.
In fact, I’ve been mourning a lot of things that seem to be going missing from my early days of wanting to become an author – RWA as a seeming powerhouse of good for authors, Romantic Times, and so many authors that seem to have disappeared from the romance genre all together (some have died but a lot of writers that I loved just seem to have stopped writing all together).
Over the last few days, I’ve been pulling out all of my romance writing materials and piling them up on my office floor – articles, tapes and CDs from RWA conferences from years ago, how-to books, inspirational pictures of characters taken from magazines over the years and a million scraps of paper with random ideas written down. The desire to become a romance author still lives inside of me – it’s a dream I’m not ready to give up on (although I definitely wonder if I shouldn’t let it go already). Maybe something inside of me thinks that because it’s November it’s time to start writing that novel even if no one knows. A ghostly surge of energy from a more innocent time when writing groups like NaNoWriMo and RWA were the shining beacons for a newbie, wannabe writer.
In some ways, I feel like I’m whining for the “good old days” but to be honest I don’t want those organizations to come back as they once were (because underneath the surface there were unacceptable things happening). I think I’m mostly sad that they failed to live up to my expectations of them and that there is nothing that has really come along and replaced them. The writing world feels more fragmented to me and harder to maneuver. I wish I was a bigger fan of the online world of Facebook groups, Reddit threads or Discord chats, but I’m not. There is only so much time in the day for me to go searching for my tribe. The nice thing about RWA and NaNoWriMo is they helped you find your tribe – they encouraged you to find people like you striving to achieve the same goals (at least, that was how it felt to me but these memories are 20 years old now so maybe I’m just remembering what I want to remember). Now, even though there are more online groups than ever, the writing world feels a bit lonelier and scary to me. I hope I have what it takes to travel this road.
