NANOWRIMO BEFORE ENSHITTIFICATION

A Retrospective

Part I

by Corwin Tomu

WHEN I WAS A YOUNG MAN I promised myself that I would never turn into a grouchy adult who sat around complaining about the kids these days. Now that I am, inexplicably but inarguably, an adult, I like to think that I kept this promise.

I live not far from an elementary school (which alone qualifies me for an administrative role above certain mods on the NaNoWriMo forums), and I often see teenagers on their bikes, or playing basketball, or other fun things which allegedly went extinct with the advent of the internet. Kids will be kids. Fun things are fun, as an anime meme says. The world is undoubtedly different for them. I’m not here to navigate us between the Charybdis of a parental and/or social media panopticon and the Scylla of total free-range children like in an 80s movie. This is not a website for minors. But it is a website for those of us who miss how the web used to be.

I joined NaNoWriMo in 2009. I found it mentioned on the forums of a different website, BehindtheName.com, which was already popular with writers brainstorming names for their characters. Before that, this website also taught me the word “homosexuality” as part of a laundry list of the patronages of the goddess Aphrodite. I was a teenager then. I loved writing stories but the thought of writing a book of my own was too overwhelming for me to comprehend. The roadmap to completion through bite-sized steps was itself a dream come true for me.

November was the perfect time. In Corwin Town, in the cold northern US, November was when the frosts killed the corn mazes but before enough snow for winter sports. The month was an even thirty-days for smoother divisions, and had two federal holidays spaced perfectly for make-up days. It was easy to find time to write, to sit on my bed with a warm mug of tea on my nightstand and type away with my laptop on my knees as the cold winds howled outside...

To be continued...