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A Cabinet of Anomalies - NaNoWriMo 2020
Nov. 1st, 2020 12:36 amOK, so I hate NaNoWriMo.
I think it's terrible to reduce the act of writing to wordcount. Wordcount is important for readers and publishers, but not for writers, in my opinion. Linking a competition to wordcount seems madness to me; sometimes, removing ten words might a better day's work than adding a thousand.
That said, I like the idea of taking a month to focus on writing - and Lord knows I could use something, anything, pushing me to work on it. Fortunately, there are "nano rebels", defined just as loosely as NaNoWriMo itself: people who are participating on NaNoWriMo, but are not writing a novel. Last year, I decided to write a text a day, using prompts made for inktober - specifically, I used AI generated prompts created by AI researcher Janelle Shane. (They are in Portuguese.) I found that to be an incredibly rewarding experience. It showed me that I can, in fact, work on writing every day; it stopped me from hewing and hawing over editing, since I had to publish SOMETHING every day; and it stopped me from feeling blocked, because if you write a text every day, of course some of them are gonna be stinkers.
I loved it, but I wasn't going to do it this year. I considered doing it on October, but that was the first time I was able to spend some time with my girlfriend since March, so I decided not to take time off smooching. And I knew that on November I'd be busy with Eita! Magazine, a project to publish texts by Brazilians to English-speaking audiences.
But then, Janelle Shane made another series of AI-generated prompts for this October.
And this one - well, it was love at first sight.
So I'll be a NaNo Rebel again this year. It won't be short stories, though. It'll be something different. I'll start with an 'in-universe' explanation of what I'm doing.
I think it's terrible to reduce the act of writing to wordcount. Wordcount is important for readers and publishers, but not for writers, in my opinion. Linking a competition to wordcount seems madness to me; sometimes, removing ten words might a better day's work than adding a thousand.
That said, I like the idea of taking a month to focus on writing - and Lord knows I could use something, anything, pushing me to work on it. Fortunately, there are "nano rebels", defined just as loosely as NaNoWriMo itself: people who are participating on NaNoWriMo, but are not writing a novel. Last year, I decided to write a text a day, using prompts made for inktober - specifically, I used AI generated prompts created by AI researcher Janelle Shane. (They are in Portuguese.) I found that to be an incredibly rewarding experience. It showed me that I can, in fact, work on writing every day; it stopped me from hewing and hawing over editing, since I had to publish SOMETHING every day; and it stopped me from feeling blocked, because if you write a text every day, of course some of them are gonna be stinkers.
I loved it, but I wasn't going to do it this year. I considered doing it on October, but that was the first time I was able to spend some time with my girlfriend since March, so I decided not to take time off smooching. And I knew that on November I'd be busy with Eita! Magazine, a project to publish texts by Brazilians to English-speaking audiences.
But then, Janelle Shane made another series of AI-generated prompts for this October.
And this one - well, it was love at first sight.
So I'll be a NaNo Rebel again this year. It won't be short stories, though. It'll be something different. I'll start with an 'in-universe' explanation of what I'm doing.
