Writing

National Novel Writing Month is closing down

Futurism has the story here: NaNoWriMo Goes Bankrupt After Embracing AI

It’s sad but not surprising that this is how NaNoWriMo ends. After dealing with moderator issues on their forums, the non-profit bafflingly chose to not just embrace AI, but accuse people opposed to it of ableism, showing a serious lack of insight into both accessibility concerns and creative writing. I wrote about it here.

The letter from the interim director suggested people were too cheap to donate, while gliding over the fact that over two-thirds of their expenses were for employee benefits, which is unusually high for a non-profit.

I stopped participating in NaNoWriMo years ago, but would periodically log into the site, check my profile, and ponder fiction writing in general. It’s a shame that it all fell apart like this.

We still have Writing Month, among other sites, still around. Onward with the making of words and the telling of stories!

Also, glib but accurate meme (not made by me):

I re-read the prologue of an unfinished novel and want to read more

The unfinished novel is my own, Road Closed (the title will almost certainly be changed to something else, should the novel ever be finished). The prologue outlines the tragic summer and drink-to-forget beginnings of young Christian Warren, setting the stage for the five-year jump ahead as the story begins proper.

But the rest of the book–which is currently sitting at around 70,000+ words, is a bit of a mess. And it’s not the mess where you can just keep writing, then go back and fix the messy bits later. It needs serious surgery. But I kind of want to try, because that prologue still delights me today.

In order to do this, I’ve pondered ways to make it happen:

  • As much of a distraction-free environment as possible. I could write it in Linux, where I am far less likely to suddenly decide I need to play Diablo 3 again RIGHT NOW.
  • Choosing software. I am probably going to avoid Ulysses going forward. It’s good, but Mac-only and I’m culling pretty much anything that has a subscription attached. Other alternatives:
    • Microsoft Word. Ew, no.
    • Scrivener. Maybe, but I would save files locally and only work in either Linux or Windows, not both.
    • noVelWriter. This is new, and is kind of a Scrivener-lite, but open source, free and a bit clunky, as one often expects of FOSS1Free Open Source Software software.
    • The unnamed app the Scrivener team is releasing in 2025. It sounds like a pared-down Scrivener, which would delight me.
    • Obsidian. I’m not super-keen on this, though I did write the original draft of Road Closed with WriteMonkey, which uses the same minimalist Markdown aesthetic as Obsidian.
    • Something else I haven’t discovered yet.
  • Writing out a revised version of the story before diving back in, so I have an actual path to follow. I can always veer from it later, but it’s still better than going into a dark room and bumping my knees on every piece of furniture.

I am in my Mulling and Pondering stage, also known as M&P. I will update if I move beyond this to Typing Actual Words.

My nigh-hopeless search for a WordPress replacement continues

I didn’t realize Blogstatic has an 8-day free trial, but it does! I have two days left on mine, and while I was initially enthused about it, because it seemed to tick so many boxes, I find it has some issues:

  • I don’t particularly like any of the few themes it offers
  • Customization is rather limited
  • I don’t want to go deep into the plumbing to modify a theme more to my liking
  • Limited image support (no lightbox or click-to-enlarge support that I can see, though it’s possible I’m just a big dummy and am not seeing these things)
  • Some of the editing interface is a bit confusing (which is something of a burn, when you consider how cluttered and messy WordPress’s editor is)

This means none of the following sites I’ve tried have really hit everything I want:

  • Pika
  • Bear
  • Scribbles
  • Posthaven
  • Blogstatic
  • Write As
  • Possibly others I’m forgetting

All of the above are perfectly fine (or even great) for posting text, but I also want to post photos and drawings, so image management is important, and they all fall short in some way when it comes to that. I am sad.

I still have a Ghost trial to experiment with (kinda pricey), and there are other sites I’ve probably overlooked. Doing searches for WordPress replacements yields a lot of stuff designed for SEO/commercial interests, not just little sites for hipster bloggers not looking to be a content farm.

I will report back with more on this hopeless quest soon™.

In the meantime, here is a cat blogging furiously.

Posthaven: Initial thoughts

I decided to give Posthaven a shot. You can view my extensive archive of (as of this writing) one post here: https://stanwjames.posthaven.com/

As a WordPress alternative, it strips blogging down to its basics. Is this good? Is this bad? Let’s make a list (or two)!

The Good

  • It’s very easy to use. I was able to jump in and have things set up in a few minutes.
  • It’s affordable! At $5 U.S. per month, it gives you up to 10 blogs (!) and as far as I can tell, you can only pay $5 per month, which means no year-long commitments. Want out after the first $5? Easy-peasy!
  • It has a few nice themes to get you started.
  • Editing posts is simple.
  • Adding images is easy, and it automatically lets you click to expand on them. Other embeds (YouTube, etc.) are also straightforward.
  • It has tags. I like tags. Maybe too much.
  • People can easily upvote, comment or subscribe to your blogs.
  • An RSS feed is available.

The Not So Good

  • A large part of the ease of use is found through its limited options. You get some basic formatting options, and that’s about it.
  • It only has five themes. If you want to create new ones, you can, but have to dive into HTML and CSS.
  • It has no spelling checker, and LanguageTool does not seem to work in its text editor. This led me to editing my one post about seven times as I kept finding typos. I make a lot of typos.
  • Images are not displayed in any kind of WYSIWYG way and they are sized based on the theme.
  • Its feature request page only has two features as “planned”: more themes and markdown support.

The site describes itself as a work in progress, so I don’t ding it too much for being a bit barebones. The UI is simple, but very easy to use, and it’s one of the few blogging platforms I’ve been able to jump into and get posts out of that both look good and are easy to write/edit.

Still, I’m not ready to go all-in. I must continue to experiment before leaving WordPress behind.

An important blogging tip

Do you want to join in the new retro fad of blogging like it’s 1999? I have an important tip to make the experience better for you and your readers, be they actual people, bots, AI or perhaps hyper-intelligent farm animals.

An example of a hyper-intelligent farm animal. Also, you should watch Gravity Falls.

That tip is:

Never remote-link to images

I made it big because it’s important. You see, back in the olden times of badly-compressed JPGs and animated GIFs that were the size of postage stamps, there was this unspoken assumption that the internet (or more specifically, the World Wide Web1LanguageTool is insisting I capitalize this and I’m not in the mood to argue part of it) was forever. If something made it to the net, it stayed there. Everyone had a site or a blog or a page under construction, and it was messy and great.

Then the big companies moved in and basically paved over all of that. The do-it-yourself sites like GeoCities, Angelfire and others went away. Blogrolls turned into quaint relics. Algorithms and feeds took their place. And really, it seems a lot of people are happy today to just scroll through slop content made by machines others.

But the lesson for you, the brave new blogger, is this: Despite the Internet Archive (bafflingly the victim of an attack as I type this), and other efforts to preserve the web days of yore, there’s a decent chance that the witty image you link to in a blog post will be gone in seven years. Or maybe even next week. It could get deleted by the host, or moved. Maybe the site it’s hosted on vanishes into the ether. The point is, when you remote-link to an image, you are gambling that the image will stay put. And I am here to tell you it will not.

See the image above? I found it doing a search for “super smart Waddles”. But the copy you’re looking at is one I’m hosting myself. As long as I maintain my blog, the image will remain. The pig stays, because I brought the pig home.

Blog smart, fellow writers!

Am I thinking about writing a novel again?

Photo by Leah Newhouse. Also an accurate reflection of how I type.

Sort of.

The AI debacle over at National Novel Writing Month prompted me to look at my collection of unfinished novels and ask myself, “Hey, would I like to start yet another novel and probably not finish it?”

And the answer is…maybe!

The nice part is that this time I’d be doing it outside NaNoWriMo, meaning I can work on whatever schedule I like, such as:

  • Write 500 words per day
  • Write 1,000 words per week
  • Think, sincerely, and at length, about one really great idea for a novel while writing absolutely nothing
  • Write 2,000 words, start over in a different piece of software, then repeat several times before being distracted by something else
  • Switch to longhand, write three pages, have my hand cramp up horribly and wonder what the hell I was thinking
  • Look, it would have been a great novel, OK?

I’ve got options, is what I’m saying. Let’s see what happens next!

The angry screeds are coming from inside the blog

UPDATE, September 27, 2024: Fixed some details. Also, here is a longish piece by Josh Collinsworth that covers the whole sorry affair in detail. The only thing missing is Mullenweg's announcement to give WP Engine a four-day "reprieve", written in the same churlish tone as everything else he's put out recently. I would not invite this guy to your next birthday party.

It seems that a dispute has erupted between WordPress and WP Engine, a company that makes use of WordPress in ways that the WordPress founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg apparently does not like. There are cease and desist letters, lawyers and all that involved now.

This has led to a couple of unusual entries in the normally quiet WordPress Events and News section of my blog’s dashboard, as seen below.

Clicking the links (you can’t click them in the image, sorry!) will lead to the WP founder saying mean things about WP Engine, even calling it a “cancer.” He had threatened to bad mouth WP Engine at a major public WP event (ironically sponsored in part by WP Engine) if WP engine didn’t share some of their sweet lucre with him through some vaguely defined licensing something-or-other that Matt appeared to have invented very recently. WP Engine asked for more time, Matt took that as no and the bad-mouthing took place). It’s ugly all around.

And what this person–the CEO and founder of WordPress–has done has made people start to question the actions of WordPress as an organization, and how much it can be trusted moving forward. It takes a long time to build a good reputation, but only moments to ruin one.

I was already revisiting my (ever)quest to move my blogging, and this is…helping. I’m not sure if that’s the outcome Matt Mullenweg was looking for.

I’m going to be rich!

See:

But (a little) more seriously, I’ve been looking at novel-writing software and there are a few trends I’ve noticed:

  • A lot of software has moved to the browser (kind of yucko).
  • Most software has a monthly or yearly subscription attached (definitely yucko).
  • No one really recommends Microsoft Word, but a few recommend Google Docs (??).
  • Most non-browser software seems to run on Windows or Mac, but rarely both.
  • Scrivener is the unicorn because it supports Windows, Mac and has a one-time purchase price. It even works on Linux if you are willing to fiddle a bit (no actual fiddle skills required).
  • There seems to be a split between software that is pretty and modern, and One Dude Who Knows How to Code But Uses UI by Caveman Design.
  • None of the “best of” lists I looked at offered anything for Linux. Sorry, Tux! This is mildly surprising, because novelWriter is open source software that runs on all three desktop platforms: Windows, macOS and Linux. I’m trying it out now and will have more on it soon™.

In reality, I probably have the best option already, the aforementioned unicorn of Scrivener. But I am still traumatized by how it munged my work, and it does not play nice with network drives or cloud services, and I’m not yet certain if I want to restrict my writing to one platform. Maybe I should.

Also, this is my way of saying I may start writing fiction again. Woo. Or at least woo-ish.