Progress Report

I had a little fender bender yesterday that thoroughly ruined what had already been a hard day. For some reason I can’t begin to fathom, I scheduled a bunch of meetings and phone calls on the same day. On the way home from the last one, I bumped into the car in front of me at a light.

I have recently had a change in meds that seems to have kicked off some world class insomnia. Thanks to the insomnia, my brain fog is thicker than ever and I am living in a strange, nebulous dimension where 3 hours and 3 minutes are roughly equivalent. This certainly didn’t make my overpacked day any better.

Today has been better, aside from completely forgetting my therapy appointment this afternoon. I got a fair amount of sleep last night, which helped a lot. It has been a lot easier to organize my thoughts today.

I have an official business email address now and I am working on business plans and paperwork. I feel like a real entrepreneur today. I am pleased with myself.

I was able to earn a little money working my AI training gig today. I could devote a little more time to it than I do, but I am mainly using it to make my off-hours downtime more profitable. As someone who has an interest in Gen AI and finds mediocre AI responses frustrating, I am glad to have the chance to help correct some of its flaws.

…Which brings me back to NYNN. I had conceived of it as a NaNoWriMo alternative, but that was long before the controversies that have arisen recently. I just wanted something I could actually complete at a time when I would be able to work on it. It’s coincidentally good timing for my writing challenge that I decided to announce it right around the time that their statements approving the use of AI have gotten a lot of people very upset.

For me, NaNoWriMo was always about the camaraderie. Participating in the community was the fun part for me. That may be part of what I am trying to recapture in sharing my novel writing challenge instead of just doing it by myself without saying anything. If you’re going to put yourself through something difficult for the fun of it, it’s nice to have others experiencing the same kind of triumphs and failures. The support (and the humor) are a welcome change from ordinary life. Writing can be an isolating, solitary pursuit if you don’t involve yourself with other writers and creatives.

I have what will likely be an unpopular take: people have always pulled some wild shenanigans to “win” NaNoWriMo. If you’re going to be okay with people who quote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in its entirety or spend several thousand words plagiarizing the plot of the TV show they’re watching, what difference does AI make except to make it faster to generate 50000 words of nonsense? For that matter, it may be less nonsensical than what people actually write without the help.

All of this to say that I did the preliminary work involved in setting up a Facebook group and a subreddit dedicated to NYNN.

I made minor progress on a broad selection of my projects today. After the day I had yesterday, all of those tiny steps in the right direction feel like a sweet victory.