Your Civic Duty to Make Art

Soft humming of the radiator is all I hear as the fire glow of sunrise bleeds through the window. I’m awake too early to write this. Eating Mediterranean crackers between paragraphs. Lighting the vanilla incense from the Tibetan shop in Inglewood. Light on my desk from green tea candle my girlfriend let me have because she has too many.

## Prelude

The black plastic Sony stereo to my right, CBC Radio One on low. I fret about them losing funding even though they don’t fairly report on the Gaza genocide. The blue Compliments water bottle re-used out of executive dysfunction, filling me with microplastics. A Rexall receipt. The stack of Field Notes. Metal lamps. The watercolour painting of the wolf and the lamb. Japanese erasers shaped like apple juice and milk cartons. The tick tick tick of the analog clock. The sunlight slowly turning sky blue as I keep writing.

## I. NaNoWriMo & Rejections

This is my November 2025. I’ve been writing nearly an article a day. Two to three thousand words per article, fact-checked, with actionable steps for readers. A spin-off experiment from the now-defunct [NaNoWriMo](https://slate.com/technology/2024/09/national-novel-writing-month-ai-bots-controversy.html).

You might have heard about their spectacular implosion. In August 2024, the organization, which for *25 years* encouraged writers to draft 50,000 words in November, [announced they wouldn’t condemn the use of AI](https://winteriscoming.net/posts/nanowrimo-faces-backlash-and-resignations-over-controversial-ai-policy-statement-01j6weztrc9s) in their writing challenge. Worse, they claimed that opposing AI was “classist and ableist.”

[Four board members resigned immediately](https://theweek.com/culture-life/books/nanowrimo-generative-ai). Their major sponsor, Ellipsus, withdrew. Authors like Erin Morgenstern, whose *The Night Circus* began as a NaNoWriMo project, publicly distanced themselves. [Chuck Wendig put it best](https://terribleminds.com/ramble/2024/09/02/nanowrimo-shits-the-bed-on-artificial-intelligence/): > “The privileged viewpoint is the viewpoint in favour of generative AI. The intrusion of generative artificial intelligence into art and writing suits one group and one group only: the fucking tech companies.” But this controversy was merely the visible rot. The organization had been crumbling for years with [problematic publisher partnerships](https://www.creativindie.com/the-fall-of-nanowrimo-ai-controversy-resignations-and-relevance-in-2024/), accusations regarding moderator misconduct toward younger participants, and a fundamental shift from hands-on literary support to hands-out donation begging. NaNoWriMo died not because of AI. It died because it stopped believing that the work itself mattered.

So here I am, doing my own version. Writing ever