A Year On,

T'was the night before NaNo and... 

The truth is it doesn't feel like it at the moment. I don't think there was a single moment I could point to where I decided I wasn't going to complete NaNo this year, whether it was NaNo itself or by another name, but the only thing I feel towards it at the moment is a real and complete sadness. 

There has been a lot of things floating around the internet about the accusations and about things which did happen, about things which can be proved and others which can't, and there's been at least some discussion of what MLs feel towards it. I would normally say MLs, both current and emeritus, but I don't know of a single person who has been accepted as an ML by the organisations new order... There has been a lot of people expressing how they feel about a lot of different viewpoints and different actions by the current and former HQs, but the only thing I find myself wanting to say about it is this: 

We've lost something. 

What we have lost is something which can be quantified - we've lost a truly global community that connected people over a passion in a way that I've not seen any other single organisation do in this space - but also not quantifiable, because we've lost a community, we've lost a space, we've lost a feeling and so much more. 

A lot of the messaging currently coming out of NaNo HQ is about how everything is getting back on track, but something feels missing. It's not like a small piece crumbled away; it feels like someone punched a section out and everything that's left is still reeling and trying to figure out how to function without it. 

Personally I have not been writing a lot for a while. Part of it is one of the slumps I get into when something like this happens, though granted the last time 'something like this' happened it was the loss of my novel, not the loss of the whole organisation and community etc. Part of it is my life moving on in a very sudden and somewhat unexpected direction. (No, I'm not talking about it. Possibly that's more of a yet than a not ever, but for now, I'm not.) Part of it is the fact that work has had me spinning like a top and the last thing I want to do when I put my laptop down for the evening is pick up another laptop, and hand writing makes my wrists cramp up. 

I didn't want to write this today because it feels like it's making me more sad, but I also feel the need to acknowledge that sadness on the eve of the anniversary of where it all started to go really wrong. At this point last year I was still hopeful that there was something that could be done to rescue what we as a community once were, but this year I realise that there is no going back.

For only the first time since I was sixteen I have absolutely zero intention of trying to write fifty thousand words in thirty days, and honestly, there are zero words that adequately express how gutted I feel about it.