Whoa!

Who ordered the snow? Anyone? Order of snow?

It's supposed to slow down this afternoon. I think there's enough accumulation that I'll have to go out and shovel. And it was so nice yesterday! So much for cleaning the leaves out of the corner of my driveway. :P

Anyway, Nanowrimo stuff. I won late Friday night, and called it done at 50,000 words plus some change. And the end result of the month is one volume each for both of my Fushigi Yuugi long fanfic series, and a decent seed for the Superhero High story later.

Piers Anthony's "pep" talk arrived today, and since I don't have any Nano spirit to crush now, I figured I'd read it and laugh my ass off. It's about what I expected from him.
The first four paragraphs are insult. Tongue in cheek insult (I hope), but still. One paragraph of tongue-in-cheek insult can be used to good effect; four is serious overkill.
The fifth one is backhanded complement -- i.e. actual insult. "You've got a 99% chance of complete worthlessness even if you succeed, but good for you for trying anyway."
Paragraph six is bragging on himself. "Why, I do this rate all the time, and I'm an old fart." Uh, Piers? You write full time. It's not really that comforting to be told that someone who has up to 16 hours a day writes at about the rate we need to achieve in 1-3 hours. Honestly, it's a little insulting.

The next two paragraphs are really pat writing advice that's been given in better forms by other people.
And the final paragraph... Um, did the Nano guys tell him that this contest starts at the first of the month, and his talk would be coming out at the end? Because he's writing like he thinks this went out OCTOBER 30th.

If someone told me that they had purposely planned for his pep talk to go out the last day so it wouldn't discourage very many participants, I'd believe it.


Now, I need to do a little complaining about how the Nanowrimo organization is run.
First, a little respect for what the organization does. It is not easy to run a site with over 100,000 members, especially one with a ton of traffic in November and then nothing for the rest of the year. It's quite a challenge they've taken on.
That said, they haven't met that challenge very well.

1) The site always goes down the first few days of the month. Always. That doesn't have to happen in this day and age. There are service providers that can temporarily expand the capabilities for one site to keep it up under unexpected high loads, while keeping it low otherwise. Besides, maybe I misunderstood, but last year didn't Chris say if they met their fundraising goals there would be shiny new servers to make sure that never happened again? Because they exceeded that goal by a fair margin, and things are actually worse this year. For example, they never did reenable the forum search. It was disabled to decrease bandwidth draw, and bandwidth use never got low enough to reenable it.

2) They can't keep shirts in stock in the store. I can understand running out at the end of the month, not wanting to be stuck with extra stock. But the first weekend I went to buy one, and they were out of just about every size, most especially my own. I went to the forum to see what the deal was, as saw a notice that they had run out on Tuesday, and got more in on Friday. Since I was ordering on Saturday or Sunday, that shows pretty well how quickly they sold out. Furthermore, I was checking periodically throughout the month, and I never did catch my size in stock. I eventually ended up going one size down and planning to not put it in the dryer until I lose a little more weight in case it shrinks. But if I weren't losing weight, I just wouldn't have bought one, and how many people just don't come back when they find their shirt not available?

This just shouldn't happen at this point. The contest has been running for 10 years. They ought to know from past participation how many participants order shirts and in what sizes. Even with the bad economy, you can make a decent guess. Order half the previous amount and they wouldn't run out so quickly.

Or, if they don't have the capital for that, 1) shame on them for poor planning. 2) Do pre-orders. Put up a notice that this is how it's working, take orders for all sizes everything in stock, and as you get enough to fill an order from the supplier, trigger it and send them out. They could do this until the 15th (or, if previous years give them an indication of a better date, use it), and then sell only the physical stock on hand so they don't end up with extra stock or having to order 2,000 shirts to fulfill one order.

3) Why, now, the press on not just making 50,000 words, but actually finishing a story, even if it means you rush through parts? That's fine for some people, but not everyone. I really hope this vanishes, but if I can't have that, I hope it remains an informal thing and doesn't become another winning requirement in the next few years

4) And finally, my obligatory complaints about the Young Writers Program. As many of you know, the Young Writers Program horrifies me. I see 20,000 kids who are having the joy of writing crushed out of them by well-meaning but hopelessly misguided teachers. One of the Daily Q&A interviews was with a teacher from a school where the entire school has to participate. And then they start editing on December 1 to 'publish' the thing, and the teachers read over it. Oh my God! Did someone look into my own personal adolescent hell and make it manifest?

I cannot in good conscience support a program that I know would have destroyed my own very passionate love of writing as a teenager, which is why I cannot give a straight-up donation to Nanowrimo.

But beyond that, let's go back in time to before the Young Writers Program. Now, I could be wrong with this, so feel free to correct me. But before that, Nano was partnered with a program that built libraries in disadvantaged countries. IIRC, any money Nano had left over after paying their expenses went to this program. I would be completely behind that. Nano would have some of my money if that was the case.

But a year or two ago, Nano decided that instead they wanted to focus on their own effort, the Young Writers Program. And at that point, from my perspective, things really went to hell in a handbasket. Now there's constant struggles for funds to support both programs, and I don't think they're going to make it this year. I can only imagine the legal stuff and extra monitoring they must go through to run an underage forum -- one that allows adults as well so teachers can participate. And what ever happened to the laptop lending library? Did that die before, or did the Young Writers Program kill that, too?

In my opinion, not only is the Young Writers Program antithetical to its stated purpose (i.e. it destroys enjoyment of writing in the very children in whom it's trying to culviate it), but it's threatening the original adult contest as well.