There have been some rather heated debates online and on social media about AI. Especially in the writing community. Several organizations I belong to have some out with AI policies. The majority of them support it for very limited uses.

Basically, using AI to write your story for you, even if you give it the names of your characters, an idea for the plot, etc. it's frowned on. So much so that if you try and submit a story, poem, or novel written by AI it will be rejected and you'll quickly get a reputation. Yes, you can self-publish it on Amazon, but it won't be very good, regardless of the hype.

What most people support is AI assisted. This is basically using a program that lets some form of AI help you with editing. It doesn't edit for you, but it will highlight problems and let you decide if you want to fix it or not. Even Word uses a type of AI for spelling and grammar checks. Programs like ProWritingAid and others also use AI to flag grammar problems.

I'm fine with AI Assisted writing. I use it myself. But to tell an AI to write something for you does nothing to help you become a better writer. It doesn't teach you the skills necessary to create story arcs, conflict, etc.

As I've mentioned in previous blogs, I didn't think I was that good as a writer, even though I came close to selling a couple of stories. My first short story sale was because Shayne Bell worked with me to get the story to where it was good enough for the anthology. I will always be grateful to him for that.

For the past twelve years I've slowly been improving as a short story writer. And as a poet. I'm even using what I learned to help my husband and daughter with their novellas.

For this and many other reasons, I have been very disappointed in NaNo this year. They recently came out with an AI policy that basically said that their focus is to help kids and adults become better writers. To that end, they accept AI written work for NaNo.

NaNo is the National Novel Writing Month. There's a non-profit organization (nanowrimo.org) that helps everyone from kids to adults write. I've been a supporter of this organization. I've done NaNo every year since 2017, the year after I stopped being a conrunner.

This year, I couldn't support it. I didn't share anything about NaNo on social media. I didn't tell my friends about it. I said nothing, because I could not say anything nice. Especially when I learned that the reason they now support AI is that they have a partner who creates a program that uses AI to write for you. So, now you can write your novel and "win" NaNo without putting any effort into it. I think that's sad. And it does a disservice to people around the world who want to become writers.

However, I still decided to write a novel this month. Or try. For the past seven years, I wrote at least 50,000 words in November. This year, I only wrote 35,639. I'm proud of that. It's been a tough month with family needing help, problems with some sites I host, two major updates of those sites, and an illness that has left me tired and a little fuzzy-headed.

I wrote every day. Some days it was less than 200 words. Some days it was more than 2000. But I wrote and I'm half way through the third book in a trilogy. It's going to need a major rewrite, but the first draft is always messy. I have some nice stuff in it, and I'm looking forward to splitting up my characters in the second half and trapping one of them in a tower. Fun stuff.

I support writing. I love writing. Doing NaNo this month helped me get back into writing longer fiction.

I want to finish this novel. And I want to write half a dozen poems. That's my goal for December. Maybe I'll even write a poem about cats and Christmas.

That gives me an idea…