This dropped yesterday, but appears to be real: NaNoWriMo is shutting down (link is to Reddit post of the text of the email, followed by a summary of the associated video; LitHub and The Guardian also covered it).

To be clear, this is NaNoWriMo the non-profit, formerly known as the Office of Letters and Light, which owns the website and runs National Novel Writing Month (50,000 words, 30 days, no plot? No problem!). They've been in a bit of a spiral for years - the forums vanished a while back, for example, and last November they made a big deal of Large Language Model AI being the future of writing. But this appears to be the finale.

What does that mean for NaNoWriMo the event? Well, personally, I never spent much time on the forums, and never attended an in-person event, so not much. ^_^ I'm not one of the people who sneeringly say things like "you have my permission to write any time you like"; the whole point is that it's a specific event, and you know other people are doing it too. But... I think I'll know that even once the venerable NaNo site goes away.

There are a bunch of word-count tracking tools to lean on, and I suspect there will be a NaNo clone site by November, but for now I recommend TrackBear, which has a handy option for importing your NaNo data. It's focussed on your own wordcounts rather than anyone else's - I've got my covers, summaries, and tracking graphs loaded in from NaNo (very quickly too!), but you only get to see the titles. But it does hold the data.

So... it's sad, but it's not the end. Two years ago I got four members of my family NaNoing with me, and I plan to do the same this year (do I know what I'm writing yet? pfft no chance). So NaNoWriMo will live on, even if the website has gone the way of the lovely embeddable word-count trackers we used to have back in the LJ days. Those were fun, I liked those.

hS