So…I held off on the negativity last month, but I had to let it out this time.
I went to the NaNo site about a week before the first, and I couldn’t take it.
What were they thinking? The colors are ugly, the design is chaotic, the forum doesn’t work properly, and the project page is insane.
The old site, each project’s page was nicely laid out. When you clicked on the name of a project, you were taken to the description of the project that you had written, and the entire focus was on the words. Because, you know, it’s about writing.
You know what you get on the new project pages? A big old picture! Of the project’s “cover.”
Because of course! What else would you want to see?
AAARRRRRGGGGHHH!!
And if you didn’t upload a cover for your project (which most people do not, because we’re writers, not graphic artists) then you see their &%$%^$#ing randomly assigned, ugly-ass genre “cover.”
Now, yes, if you click on it, it flips over (because they are apparently five years old to be impressed by that) and then you can see the text you inputted. Which has to be squished into a teeny, tiny little box that has to have double scroll bars because it’s not big enough to hold a sonnet, let alone the description of a novel or its excerpt!
Why?
Just why?
Why would anyone think that was a good idea?
All I can think is that they actively wanted to drive us away.
Oh, and guess what? Every project has a little ribbon on it that gives its current “status”. On these past projects that defaults to “Drafted” but you can change it to all sorts of things like “Completed” and even “Published.” Because of course that’s everyone’s sole goal in writing, right, to publish it?
UGH!
But you know what you can’t do regarding the project’s status? Make any indication of whether you won or lost that year’s NaNo.
And you may be saying “but they can see for themselves if you broke 50k words.” But 50,000 words is not the only requirement to win! You also have to validate your win. And some of us have other goals for NaNo, and if we don’t meet those goals, we don’t validate.
Only now they’re saying “nope, your personal goals are irrelevant, only the number of words you wrote count.”
So that time that I didn’t validate because I didn’t finish the novel? They’ve decided that it’s totally meaningless! Because evidently theirs is the only opinion that they think is worth a damn!
Well, guess what?
THEY ARE WRONG!
If they don’t value my opinions, if they write off my values as irrelevant, then I am not going to support them and take part in their now meaningless exercise.
But I enjoy the idea of NaNo, so I’m being a true NaNo rebel. I’m writing 50,000 words in November (not, at present, counting my blog entries, but if I get desperate I might add them in), and I’m using the blog to post my results. Only I haven’t started a project with them and I’m not going to, because I refuse to support that garbage they’re trying to push on us.
Since I’m being a rebel anyway, I’m being a double rebel and not starting my new project I had been planning for NaNo until I finish the project I’ve been working on for some time. I figure it’ll probably only take me a three or four more days to finish it, with luck. There’s not a heck of a lot left, and I’m not going to need to write any more scenes with the character with the cowboy dialect, so that will speed things up. Although there is the slick-talking guy…he’ll be hard to write for, but he’s only got about half a scene, so that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Once I finish it I may write a very brief side-story about a first date before I forget it, but I should be into my new project hopefully early next week. (And this time my goal really is 50k rather than “a full novel” so I’m not going to view it as a failure if I don’t complete it.)
*sigh*
Okay, sorry to unload all that negativity on you, but…sometimes you just have to vent. And this was the logical time and place to do so.
[Towards the end of the day, I’ll come back on and edit on the day’s word count here. But right now I’m writing this at 1:16 in the morning because I stupidly decided to watch Netflix while trying to blog only it was something I’d never seen before (good life advice: never get into a show when it’s already five seasons long) so it kept distracting me.]
EDIT: Today’s word count was 2,536, making for a total of 15,369 words so far in November. I’m pretty sure that puts me ahead of the curve. (Okay, just calculated it: at 1,667 words per day, the official goal for today would be 10,002, so I’m good.) Oh, and I got through the scene with the slick-talking guy successfully…though I did go down a blind alley and have to get rid of a couple hundred words of it because the conversation went in a completely wrong direction. (I just moved them to the end of the file and put them into strike-through so they’d still count, though. Because I suck like that.) Only then I decided to let one of my leads catch up with his ex the rock band (well, he was sleeping with the whole band, you know?), so that’s going to extend things a little, but not too long. I don’t think my schedule will be too much disturbed by it.
You must be logged in to post a comment.