No-vem-ber?

It is now November. The astute among yinz would ask me what is this year's NaNoWriMo entry title/topic.

And my answer is simply: I'm not taking part in NaNoWriMo this year.

I mean, check it out: 15 NaNoWriMo entries says something. I'm not burnt out on writing, but rather, a couple of things come to mind as to why I am not participating this year.

Firstly, I just have too many other things to do this time round. I'm playing with the King's Flute Choir again, this time for the flute choir concert at the Autumn Flute Fair 2024. I'm playing on my recently acquired contrabass flute in C called ``The Big Flute'' (yeah yeah... imaginative name). The Big Flute is unlike any other flutes that I have played so far---it is by far, the largest flute with a total length of about 2.73 m shaped like a 4, with an inner diameter that tapers off from 49.62 mm. In short, I needed time to both rehearse the contrabass flute parts, as well as to get used to the different embouchure, breathing, and fingering positions over the large vertically oriented flute.

Secondly, the organisation running NaNoWriMo itself was getting too damn weird and offputting. NaNoWrio's AI policy was controversial, and the next most recent not-so-nothingburger was the aftermath of some serious child grooming scandal. Something of an older vintage was the messed up web design update that happened a few years ago that broke many things, among which was the loss of almost all of one's writing buddies.

It also probably did not help that the municipal liaisons for SIN city have stepped down for their own reasons.

I say that NaNoWriMo was getting too damn weird due to the slow and steady evolution of what was a very clear [but dumb] idea of ``here's thirty days of November, here's a word count goal of fifty thousand words---go!'' into some general writing programme for young writers in the US while still maintaining some kind of international presence, with some rather vocal self-declared leftists turfing out their own fiefdoms of safe-spaces within the forums themselves. I'm all for being inclusive, but I do not necessarily subscribe to the metaphorical carving of feudal lands in what was essentially an open agora in the first place. I resent the hypocrisy of alleged inclusion through the use of identity politics---if you want some safe space for your kind of people, maybe do it elsewhere, and not carve up the public space and practise the hypocrisy of accusing others of being discriminative while practising discrimination on their own.

Thankfully I was never in a position in NaNoWriMo where I had to worry about that---I stick primarily to the regional forum and stay far, far away from the places where the hypocrites lurk---but I cannot help but notice that their sheer vocal loudness was definitely shifting the overall tone of NaNoWriMo itself.

NaNoWriMo was always about reaching the fifty thousand words within the month of November---it was never about what was written. Even the word count tool, when it was still around, did nothing about reading the contents except to count the literal number of words through counting the number of whitespace segments in between the words. So why would anyone care if someone's NaNoWriMo story was some racist diatribe, or if someone wanted a white male as their protagonist with nary a female in sight, or if their writing of the behaviour of the woman in the story was close to some messed up erotica than what a ``real and normal woman'' is?

So yeah, NaNoWriMo was getting weird and offputting.

Will I get back to it next year? Who knows---let me survive my upcoming birthday first, then we talk.

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In other news, Cookie Clicker. This has been running almost continuously in the background of Eileen-III for the past two or three weeks. Big numbers with big names for big numbers are always fun.

And then, there's Persona 5 Royal that I have been playing after work. It... reminds me too much of the time when I was still studying. Cleared three Palaces, and there are more to go.

I'd keep writing more, but then I realised we're past stupid o'clock. I'm on leave tomorrow (or rather, today), so it's not that big a deal, even though I really want to catch up on sleep.

And thus, adieu.