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Online decentralization and Wikiwrimo

If you know me at all, you probably know about Wikiwrimo, my passion project of the past thirteen years. It’s been cited by sources all over the internet, the folks at NaNo HQ use it, and I’m pretty sure Wikiwrimo has helped me get at least one job.

If you don’t know this, you’re probably in that very large circle of people who play my secret Pokemon Go hobby but somehow don’t know about my less secret hobby of NaNoWriMo.

It’s a weird secret to keep because in case you haven’t noticed, I haven’t worked that much on the wiki in over a year. I mentioned this last year; I don’t need the money to keep the site afloat. I need help.

I’ve touched on the topic before, both in my 2021 post asking for Wikiwrimo help and in the “What has happened here?” thread on the NaNoWriMo forums in late 2022.

Now, the biggest challenge to running Wikiwrimo isn’t help. There’s a wider issue of decentralization online that is not unique to NaNoWriMo, and you’ve probably noticed it in every online community you’re in.

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NaNoWriMo 2021: The Virtual World Tour, Part Two

Since NaNoWriMo remained all-virtual this year, there was only one thing for a Sushi to do: Continue the virtual world tour. I kept the same rules as last year’s tour with one twist: No repeat visits. And yes, this includes last year’s visits.

This twist eliminated almost a hundred regions, but hundreds of regions remained to visit. I set out on the tour, hoping to visit at least eighty more. With four non-weekend days away from work throughout the month, comparable to last year, this felt like an achievable goal.

Most of the logistics are the same as last year. Here’s where I talked about last year’s virtual world tour.

Let’s get to it.

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NaNoWriMo 2021: The Writing Part

2021 was my 20th NaNoWriMo. I had big dreams after last year’s virtual world tour. I’d write a lot of words. I’d reconnect with Wrimos new and old. I’d write my best book to date.

But the panini still wasn’t done cooking, so once again, NaNoWriMo was all-virtual. Womp.

The world tour post is coming, so let’s talk about the writing first.

Two charts displaying my NaNoWriMo 2021 stats.

I won’t lie, this November was hard. For once I had an idea over 24 hours in advance: a rewrite of my 2019 NaNoWriMo novel, where a human is the test subject for an AI version of herself and everyone likes the AI version better. Despite a big start and reaching 50,000 words on day seven, I fell flat on my face after that, struggling for days at a time despite attending multiple write-ins most days. I thought one book would be enough to reach my goal of 100,000 words because the first draft crossed that line handily before I had any idea of the deeper story happening.

So I found myself dumbfounded when that book ended at 86,000 words. Now what? I couldn’t let a six-digit streak die. Heck, at this point I’ve written the double NaNo longer than I haven’t. I considered writing scenes that should have happened earlier in the book but decided against it; doing this would send me down the rabbit hole of editing. Instead I flipped through past NaNo projects in search of one that could use that NaNo magic with a rewrite and was disappointed when I couldn’t find any. (In fact, I couldn’t remember some of those stories in the first place. Oops.) In the end I wrote about a side character from last year’s novel, the main character’s best friend who moved before the main events of the story.

Wow, that book was a slog. I had a general idea but it became apparent early on that I should have set the book in the fall semester instead of the spring semester and wow, these teenagers were acting like miniature adults because all they cared about school and the main character got into Tetris so naturally I took a lot of Tetris breaks for “research” as the month wore on. All these mistakes I made early in the story hammered at me in the back of my head, but there was no way to go back.

I left the second book unfinished around 30,000 words. I need to figure out its general direction, but I’m glad I started it. This book is the other perspective of my 2020 novel, and having a companion book in the works will be nice if the first one gets published.

The current state of the world led to some interesting questions in my novels. For context, both books take place in the real world’s San Francisco Bay Area, but the scifi book takes place in the near-ish future and the young adult novel takes place now-ish (minus the pandemic). I was hesitant to nail down the exact date of the scifi novel because it would open a lot of questions: How old were the characters during the pandemic? What else has happened to the world since then? Has society become more or less divided?

The scifi novel’s characters work in tech, and as I wrote scenes of them in the office I found myself thinking things like “Would they even be in an office? Will the pandemic shift the world that much? Will Silicon Valley still be a prestigious place for tech ten or twenty years in the future?” These are questions we still don’t have an answer to, especially as certain major tech companies aren’t embracing a fully remote company. This comes up more in tech for folks who have to work with the hardware. (Hey, someone had to build the AI body.) These questions never came to mind when writing the first draft in 2019 because they didn’t have to.

The young adult novel brought up similar questions. It takes place in the same universe as a novel I’ve drafted three times since 2015, when the American political atmosphere was starting to become more divided but not as starkly as it is now. A lot has changed in those six years, from the apps teens use to what we think of people we disagree with.

I also found myself thinking of how (or whether) to address the current political climate. Doing so would require placing my novel in a set point in time. For now it’s easier to write in an alternate universe where the darkness of 2016 and beyond never happened, particularly 45’s administration and the pandemic. Depending on how long I edit this novel, continuing to do this will look naive without explicitly showing the alternate timeline. Writing from a position of privilege and hiding from the present would dismiss the suffering of others who want and deserve to see themselves represented.

Which leads to my other lesson and question from this NaNoWriMo: There’s a lot of worldbuilding involved in writing contemporary fiction. Since both of these take place in some sort of alternate timeline, I need to establish some rules before editing. What happened with the pandemic and 45’s administration and that aftermath (if those things happened)? If they didn’t happen, what did happen? How did that change society?

And how can we use those possibilities to change our society for the better?

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Virtual Write-In Hosting Tools: A Breakdown

October is here, NaNoWriMo is less than a month away, and I swear I had a plot but it ran off somewhere.

Alas. It happens every year, time doing that moving forward thing.

Let’s talk about write-ins. Last year I took the all-virtual NaNoWriMo experience to the extreme, which sent me to 84 regions and 13 countries outside the US. Besides being the one bright spot to a crappy year, it was also an adventure in the many online technologies MLs were using to bring writers together, so I’ve put together this post about each tool to help others out. If you’re a first-time ML or thinking about switching tools this year, welcome! This post is for you.

I can’t recommend a specific tool for every region because every region’s needs are different. Instead I cover my observations based on my experience as a participant and what I could piece together from the host’s standpoint. Note that a shorter list for one tool doesn’t mean that it’s bad or I didn’t like it; it just means I didn’t get as much experience with that tool.

NaNoWriMo 2020: An Adventure in Virtual Globetrotting

Another 30 days of March pretending otherwise, another NaNoWriMo. This year was my nineteenth, and while I didn’t shatter any records, it was as good a NaNo as 2020 would allow. I wrote the third draft of the Anxiety Girl novel, which was a last minute decision (almost literally, I decided to do this around noon on Halloween, leaving almost no time to prepare). Sure, half the book is out of order and it’s unrecognizable compared to the first draft, but I solved several of the major plot holes hanging in the first two versions. To address what people come here to find out: I wrote 154,594 words and reached 50k on the 11th.

For 2020, that looks something like this:

sushimustwrite's NaNoWriMo 2020 word count chart, both overall and per day. The dip during the US election and soaring during the London lock-in are labeled.

All in all, a good year for words despite having no idea what I was doing, but nothing record-breaking. I’m fine with that.

Every NaNo is a different experience and 2020 is no exception with its unique way of making everything weird. This pandemic has already taken away opportunities to see friends, travel, and continue working at a job I enjoyed, and now it was taking away chances to meet other Wrimos too.

Or was it…

When I heard in August that all of NaNoWriMo’s official events would be virtual this year, I mourned yet another thing that the pandemic had taken away but knew it was the right decision. As the weeks passed and NaNo prep kicked into full gear, I turned this over in my head.

It started as a half-joke but as the weeks passed by, I realized that because all NaNo events were virtual, geography couldn’t stop me from attending write-ins anywhere, making a global tour of NaNo regions possible.

Early October turned to mid-October and I started browsing regions where I had friends or regions that would simply to be cool to visit. I had two hard-and-fast rules. First, no regions I’ve already visited in person. The point is to visit new regions, after all. This eliminated about ten regions. Second, no regions where English isn’t a primary language spoken in the region’s NaNo community. The second rule is why I never visited Central America, South America, or continental Europe outside of a global Discord crawl mid-month. I put a lot of thought into the second rule and decided that visiting all the continents would be cool, but not at the expense of making local communities bend to a possibly unannounced visitor’s will.

It was a blast.

NaNoWriMo 2020 saw me visiting 84 new regions across 42 states and the District of Columbia, plus 13 countries outside of the United States. I attended Melbourne’s Cup Day write-in, London’s all-nighter (which lasted only until 2 AM for me thanks to the magic of time zones), and a NaNo trivia event in New York City that wasn’t all about NaNo but did reveal how little everyone knows about lakes. (Lake Victoria is the second-largest freshwater lake, not the largest.) I wore silly hats in El Paso, listened to island-themed music in Naperville (western Chicago suburbs if you didn’t know), won a duck sticker in Seattle, and discovered the cheese mystery in Glasgow. I rolled out of bed early to visit Yorkshire and Edinburgh and Northwest Ireland and South Africa. I kicked word count butt in Boston, Salt Lake County, and Las Vegas, but definitely not everywhere else. I sneaked into friends’ write-ins and waited for them to notice.

I intentionally sought out big and small regions alike because NaNoWriMo doesn’t exist solely in these large mega-regions. NaNoWriMo connects Wrimos in small towns and in regions consisting of entire states and countries, in communities where Wrimos feel like they’re the only creative person in town. In fact, finding some of these smaller regions became my mission during the last week of November when I plotted out my states visited on a map and realized that with some scheduling Tetris and luck in existing events, visiting forty states could happen.

And it did.

In fact, the medium and small regions were just as fun and engaging. Tallahassee encouraged me to get that shiny Lugia after a sprint. (It was not shiny, but I did eventually get one.) We discovered that it really is a small NaNo world in Nashville. Billings challenged us all with word sticks, Box of Doom style. Mississippi had a grand old time in an old school chat room. As the last week arrived, we celebrated winners crossing the finish line, Wrimos coming back from behind, and writing The End.

This virtual world tour provided something else I didn’t expect: something to look forward to when the world is determined to rob us of joy. As my calendar filled up with write-ins from around the world, I got excited about going to Spokane, Washington; Melbourne, Australia; and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan — all in the same week. This never would have happened if we could travel safely or attend in-person writeins. Every write-in added to the calendar was a concrete event to look forward to with real people, often on voice or camera. I never would have crossed paths with many of you otherwise, and my life is better for it. All of them — all of you — make NaNoWriMo what it is.

Thank you MLs, Wrimos, and NaNoWriMo staff for making this NaNoWriMo a light in the darkness that was so desperately needed last month.