RIP NaNoWriMo

Two months after announcing that NaNoWriMo would be shutting down due to funding issues, the site is down.  If you hadn’t yet saved your participation data, it appears that window is closed… assuming the site doesn’t resurrect itself, but that seems unlikely given the announcement at the end of March.

I don’t know exactly when the site went down, but it’s been sometime since last week, as I believe the last time I checked it was almost exactly a week ago.

I wrote last year about word count trackers to use as alternatives for NaNoWriMo.  I tried all of them during November, and settled on TrackBear as a clear favorite.  One of the advantages had been the ability to download your writing stats from the NaNoWriMo site, but of course that’s no longer a consideration.  Even so, I highly recommend TrackBear.  The only thing I think it’s missing is a progress widget.

NaNoWriMo may be officially gone, but the spirit of the challenge will persevere.  There are many of us who plan to maintain the local communities and even pursue the original challenge of writing a 50,000-word novel in November (or, really, any month — some communities are changing it to a month that makes more sense for them).

The Denver region intends to keep the original spirit of NaNoWriMo alive for our local participants.  We had already established a year-round write-in and, once the scandal broke last year, we started taking our region in a more independent, unaffiliated direction.  It turns out it’s a good thing we already started that process, as we’re fully on our own now!  We’ll see in the coming months what, exactly, the future of the Denver NaNoWriMo region will look like.