No Mo

I've been looking forward to joining NaNoWriMo.org (National Novemer Writer's Month) since June. This was the 4th time I signed up, and this year I was determined to be ready, to hit the ground running, and to finish. I even trained for the event with this blog.

Well, the good news is that I'm still going to finish a book this year, for the first time ever. The bad news is NaNoWriMo itself. The kindly group of cheerleaders who used to offer inspiration to the 'Little Writer Who Could' morphed into a fundraiser.

I get it. It's a big job to keep a site up and running with such a big audience. People need to get paid. I might have kicked in someday, if I'd made-money-from-writing, thanks-to-their-encouragement. Which, of course, never happened. Frankly, I'd like to get paid for my time. I'm not. Why are they asking me for money?

Their 'hook' was that donations will help young writers who can't afford camps, workshops, and training. Apparently old writers who can't afford camps, workshops and training are dog-do. Seems to me that people with life experience who are trying to turn their lives around, and don't have lots of resources (or years) to do so, need assistance more.

There's also the feeling that they're milking the wrong cows. Markets for writers are drying up. Publishers become fewer and fewer. As more people give up on the job market, more of them decide that they may as well try write that book. So we have more writers than ever, and it's harder than ever to get a pay day. Seems like the wrong group to hit up for funds.

So I bailed out of Fundraising Central and took a full week off to get the bad taste out of my mouth. Now I'm starting again with a new attitude. Instead of NaNoWriMo, I'll celebrate "Personal Author's Year-end-Motivated Endeavor." PAY-ME pledges to motivate and encourage a struggling author, me, to finish her book by the end of 2014.

The time for fundraising will be when the book is finished. The fundraising drive will be correctly aimed at a target market of publishers and/or actual readers. So no donations, please. All I ask is encouragement.