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NaNoWriMo Resources & Alternatives

So, NaNo prep season is upon us once again. And, as most people expected, things are still very messy over at HQ. The MLs haven't been hired or trained yet with less than a month to go, the forums are still frozen, and now NaNoWriMo has officially taken a stance in defense of the use of generative AI. (If you want a more complete rundown of the non-stop controversy that has been plaguing the NaNo community for over a year now, check out nanoscandal.com for a comprehensive timeline of the disaster.)

Where does that leave us? Well, unfortunately, the community has scattered in every direction. I think that's to be expected, though, given how chaotic and uncertain everything is right now. A lot of regions have opted to still do the 50k in November challenge, just separate from the "official" event. Others are going a step further and changing the name/tags they will use for the challenge. And a few have given up entirely and set up a completely different event/goal to try to hit. Confusingly, a lot of people are still choosing to associate with the main NaNo group, and even offer their support by still using the official website for tracking their word counts. Not sure how they managed to justify that in their own heads, but to each their own.

As for me, I'm going to still be doing the 50k in November challenge, and I'll be doing it with my local region group, but we won't be using the official website to track our words or communicate. We've moved to Facebook (yes, I know, but a lot of our group are old lol) and Discord. I'm still using the NaNo name/tag for now, but only until we can get some sort of agreement from the community on what name we should be using instead.

For anyone else participating this year -- and not wanting to openly support a writing organization that has tried to cover up grooming allegations, racism scandal, and now actively supports generative AI -- here are a few resources and alternatives you can use this year instead of using the official site. These are just the ones I've personally tried out and feel comfortable recommending for other people to use. However, some very cool people on the NaNo reddit community have compiled a massive list of alternatives, which you can find here if you would like to explore even more options!

Whatever route you decide to go for NaNo this year, I wish everyone a very good November and lots of words. Good luck!

Word count tracking:

TrackBear - Tbh, this word count tracker works better than the NaNo site regardless of the current controversies.
OWL - I just signed up so I haven't had time to really try this one yet, but it seems pretty good so far.
Word Tracker Spreadsheets - A NaNo participant created some very cool word tracking spreadsheets to use.
GoogleSheets - Here's a fantastic GoogleSheet word tracker. Just save off a copy to your own google drive and personalize as needed!
WordCounter - And just in case your writing software doesn't do word counting for you, here's a handy website where you can copy/paste your work to have your total words calculated for you.

Writing software:

Dabble - I started using Dabble about three or four years ago, and have almost exclusively used it for my writing ever since. It's a bit pricey, unfortunately, so be aware of that before signing up. The features are fantastic though, and imo it easily beats all other writing apps.
Ellipsus - I just signed up for this one a few days ago, so I haven't had time to play around in it yet. But so far it seems very straightforward and easy to work with. It's pretty much a fancier and better version of Google Docs. Oh, it's also free to use and cross-platform so you can write on your phone too. They also listened to the writing community's concerns and pulled their sponsorship from NaNo, so I feel like they've more than earned some support in return.