I've been wanting to come back to blogging for a long time. I decided to start with something small and started updating my sidebar listing current and upcoming challenges. One of the upcoming challenges I planned to list was NaNoWriMo. To my utter shock, it no longer exists.
I realize I'm late learning about this. I'm over a year late. The website officially shutdown in May 2025. It seems the trouble started long before that because there were several scandals that rocked this 20 year long tradition starting in 2023. Some sources say it was two major ones while others simply claim it was financial trouble, but there seems to be a lot more to the story. I was oblivious to everything happpening.
A website called NaNoWriMo 2.0 has made a lengthy Google Docs document giving a highly detailed timeline of all the alleged scandals. I say alleged because some of these scandals are not just embarassing, they are potential crimes. Break out the ukele kind of stuff. Most of the articles written about the end of NaNoWriMo did not include the juiciest of the details so if you want all the cold tea you need to read this document.
I took to my favorite social media site Twitter (Yes I refuse to call it X) to try to get a vibe about how people feel about NaNoWriMo being gone. Some celebrate it. Some still discuss their experiences doing the challenge with fondness. Some, like me, are completely out of the loop and trying to peice together what happened.
With fall quickly aspproaching many will be asking what do we do instead? Many people don't even think about the event until we get closer to November so I'm sure there are people who will be just learning that it no longer exists.
The website NaNoWriMo 2.0 seems to be an attempt to salvage this decades long tradition but there's also a website called NaNo 2.0 that includes the founder Chris Baty. I don't know if these are competing sites because the group factioned or if the groups behind each website werre involved in the scandals. The NaNoWriMo 2.0 website is the one giving the detailed list of the scandals so I can only assume they are not associated with each other. Until I learn more I cannot advise anyone on using either of these websites for anything other than informational purposes.
Fortunately. Martin Cavannagh at Reedsyblog has put together a short list of possible replacements. I will be listing these events on my sidebar under upcoming challenges as they become updated for 2026. Some are missing links for this year's event.
I also found some additional sources from people giving helpful tips on what we should do now that NaNoWriMo is gone as well as articles about it's demise.
