Josh Writes a Blog

Category: writing

  • A Belated Eulogy for NaNoWriMo

    I learned today that National Novel Writing Month, or, rather, the current organization behind the project, has shut down as of April 2025. I am sad to hear about this new, despite having deleted my own account in 2024 after feeling rather icky about NaNoWriMo’s AI statement.1 It seems I was not alone, and many other people left, and that plus lack of funds meant the 25-year-old writing challenge was kaput.

    I first learned about NaNo in 2002, at the ripe age of 19. In those halcyon days, I used to write serialized fiction, posting the chapters online for my AOL friends to read. At some point, the 50,000 word novel writing challenge in November was explained to me, and I, like a lot of people, thought it was great. And I was hooked; around the end of October, I would remember that NaNoWriMo was coming and would start to plot what I wanted to write that year. (It truly is funny that I am writing this at the end of October. It’s like a mind muscle memory to think of NaNoWriMo around this time, I guess.)

    My “win” count for the site is a measly three novels, of which one I much later realized was the same plot as The Running Man (novel, not movie). And perhaps I should count my graduate thesis play, Peace, which was not 50,000 words but was, at least, completed. Most of my early novel attempts coincided with college; namely, with me being in plays and having to stop writing when the show got closer to opening. A whole lot of concepts, jettisoned and left to linger in various writing folders on my computer or on Google Drive. I started in 2002 but my first win wasn’t until 2014, which also happened to be my first year out of grad school.

    Similarly, I wasn’t very active in the forums either, or the group writes or any of that. There weren’t a lot in Idaho, where I lived when I started writing, and by the time I moved to Portland, I was so used to not doing NaNo as a group event that I just never participated, other than introducing myself on the regional forums.

    That said, NaNoWriMo was a really special event. It was the perfect introverts challenge, for starters: you put in as much engagement with it as you’d like, and weren’t expected to do more (or less). You could go to a group write, or you could write alone at your computer. It was all participation. It also resulted in a lot of fairly well known novels. Hugh Howey’s Silo series is perhaps the most famous as of this writing, due to the books being turned into an AppleTV show (which in some ways is better and worse than the books). And the weekly “pep talks” by famous authors was great. To have a community you could engage with on your terms felt very special.

    NaNoWriMo was a foundational experience for my writing history. It was a challenge that did not hold your hand and ultimately only had you as the arbiter of whether you won or not. The 50,000 words was arbitrary; a nice round number and fairly acceptable novella writing length, but it could be anything. You could write ten 10,000 word short stories. You could write a play! Or music, or poetry, or whatever. The point was that you showed up and participated. And that sense of self-fulfillment carried with me to this very day. It really taught people that you just gotta get up and do the thing if you want to get to 50,000 words, or 10,000 steps per day, or three miles run, or four … quilts made. You get the gist.

    And it’s on that note that I will miss NaNoWriMo. I think the organization ultimately shot themselves in the foot with the AI & moderator debacles, but I also remember their fundraising campaigns never reaching the numbers they were hoping for. It makes me wonder if they were bleeding money and were hoping for some sort of financial solution through AI. Trying to get a ride on that bubble. An unfortunate reality about running a business in the modern internet era. Although the AI thing really does exemplify the “You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain” concept. Oh well.

    All things eventually end, though the spirit behind them can remain a bit longer. I think I’ll still try to participate in a writing challenge this November, for example. November Novel Drafting Challenge? NoNoDraCha? Let’s see if I win this year.

    Pour a cold one out for NaNoWriMo. 1999-2025. RIP!

    1. There was also an unfortunate mishap with inappropriate behavior by moderators in their forums a couple years prior to the AI statement, which probably began to sour people’s opinions of the site. ↩︎

  • the castelina

    did cross the weary wandering
    with all the tithe in old frail pockets
    she sang like glass on guitar strings
    danced on sand like skillet hot
    did you hear the wailing though?
    caught in calliope's grasp
    a newt in a spider's web
    did you hear the wailing though?

    poseidon set deluge upon the world
    & we moved like pauper nomads
    & she sank & sat beneath the waves
    to cool her ever-fiery feet
    did you hear the wailing though?
    brought up in constant bubbles
    popped apace in dying lands
    did you hear the wailing though?

    soon she fades in piles of fog
    all supple bounding 'cross the ocean
    reborn in green & verdant fields
    the cresting of the lon garram
    did you hear the wailing though?
    no span of years could quell her voice
    anointed by the mother so--
    did you hear the wailing though?

    The islands comprising Lon Garram are the cradle of civilization. Those who grew from the ground in ages past, raised with the sweet guidance of Mother Ninti, The One Who Was, set north in the 1,000 Rains to escape the ire of Poseidon, who looked down at his dead world and wept until he was no more.

    And so they crossed north, at first on foot, and then on great ships built by the Mages in Milawa, as the sea grew and swelled. The Mages rent the steel from the tall buildings and shaped them, scuttling the great windowed beasts of the ancients, and north the nomads sailed, pressed forward by the Word of Winds.

    They ran aground on Sikirsan, where they remained, as the seas remained still, and built the great empire of Lon Garram, to stretch across the northern isles and protect the Lon Agusera from the Mountain Dwellers.

    But they left her behind. The Castelina, the God-Child Anastasia, for she betrayed them in service to the Dead Gods. She sank with Poseidon and rules the Great Sea, and is only seen by the All-Mother, Ninmah.

  • Invasion of the Crab People

    “Alright, I’m going to explain this in laymen’s terms and then we’re going to figure out how to get the fuck out of here.

    “I don’t know how much you know about biology, but there’s this concept in evolutionary biology which states that the crab is the ultimate evolution. I’m … ‘ultimate’ is subjective here I guess, but they even have a term for it. Carcinization. Convergent evolution. Different species evolving into a similar thing. And on Earth, it’s crabs. Five different times in the history of the Earth, things evolved into crabs, separately from each other. You got crabs, but you also got lobsters, shrimp. Some are crabs, the ones call crabs are crabs, ‘true’ crabs they call them–“

    Something thuds against the concrete wall in the distance.

    “–holy fuck. Okay but also there are ‘false’ crabs, which are creatures that evolve crab-like traits. The king crab, for example–the fucking king crab!– is not a true crab.”

    “What is it?” says Laura.

    “False crab. Crustacean, a, ah … decapod crustacean. Strange taxonomy because they usually only have eight appendages but whatever. The thing everyone used to eat all the time wasn’t even a real crab.”

    “Why are you telling me this now–?”

    “Because. It’s important. Let’s extrapolate this concept, okay? If life on Earth regularly and eventually evolves into crabs, then it follows that crabs or creatures with crab-like traits are advantageous for, for living. Right?”

    Laura nods, hesitantly.

    “Crabs, everything should be crabs, right? Well … what about life in the universe? Is life everywhere meant to be crabs?”

    Laura stared at Paul for a few seconds. Another thud in the distance, reverberating dirt off the ceiling into a fine mist in the dimly lit room.

    “Are you saying,” she began, before pausing and staring at the ground for another couple of seconds. “Are you saying they are here because we’re not crabs?”

    Paul smiled, the kind of smile your dad gives you when you walk across the stage to get your high school diploma. “Yes. Maybe. But probably. Now. We gotta get the fuck out of here.”

    ++

    The Crustatians, or crab people if you will, arrived about six years ago? Hard to remember. First contact seemed innocuous enough; they landed in their spaceship created entirely out of the chitin of their intimately strange “queen” crab, a spaceship that was also a giant crab, with enormous hollowed out sections for living quarters, lavatories, food storage, etc. Upon embarking, the queen crab’s appendages are torn from her body, the jelly-like meat inside stored within a brine solution which keeps indefinitely. The crabs eat this while they travel through space. The queen crab survives this, by the way. They are not traveling through a corpse.

    Their hyperspace, or subspace, drive (we’re not sure which) is mind-boggling and during initial talks, their attempts to describe it to us were met with blank stares. In essence, the queen crab is capable of producing a level of energy we spent centuries trying to harness, which she uses to fold space, allowing for near instantaneous universal travel. It seems related somewhat to a mantis shrimp’s ability to strike their claws with the force of a gunshot; a level of energy creation that far surpasses the size of the shrimp itself, much like how an ant can carry 10 times its own weight.

    The queen crab does this in space. She, and I can’t believe I’m writing this out, but she clacks her claws together like you or I would snap our fingers, and then folds space using the energy, which is so massive that it defies mathematical explanation. The crab snaps her fingers and boom, they’re here. Apparently, queen crabs can only do this so often and occasionally their claws break, leaving the Crustatians stranded as the queen crab slowly regrows her limb, often using the sustenance of her own stored brine-meat, literally eating herself to grow herself back again.

    Needless to say, the scientific community was both aghast and agog during first contact.

    ++

    The concrete wall broke with a loud crash, revealing the blunt and thick end of an enormous green and white claw. Laura screamed and Paul grabbed her arm, and the two of them rushed through the network of now dry sewers beneath the city.

    “The crab people are the judges,” Paul said as a crash of debris sounded behind them. A shaft of light revealed the silhouette of the blunt-clawed crab person, only around five feet tall but broad, with one enormous hammered claw and one smaller, pincer-esque claw. Two others appeared behind them, another with a blunt claw and a third, slightly more slender, with two very thin, almost needle claws. They began pursuing Paul and Laura.

    “What do you mean?” said Laura.

    “They judge the evolution of species in the universe!”

    “Judge what? If we’re crab enough?”

    “YES!”

    They turned a corner to the right, into a smaller side tunnel. Standing in the tunnel about 20 feet away was not a crab person, but one their crablings: essentially a giant crab, not sentient like the crab people. A dog to them, in a way. Its body was wide enough to block the majority of the tunnel.

    Paul pulled Laura back and they backtracked for a bit, attempting to cross into a tunnel in the opposite direction. As they did, one of the hammer clawed crab people approached and swung their hammer claw, striking Paul in the back of his left shoulder, knocking him hard enough to send him flying and losing his grip on Laura’s hand. He slammed into the sewer wall and crumpled to the ground.

    Laura screamed but stopped then the needle-clawed crab person placed one of their claws gingerly on her lips. It made a trilling sound that was the closest thing a crab person could do to say, “Shhhh.”

    ++

    The first year or so was routine and surprisingly mundane. The Crustatians exchanged ideas with us and learned much about our history and evolutionary path. We were amazed at these humanoid looking crabs with their giant queen crab spaceship; they were amazed that apes had evolved into using tools and even inventing space travel. This is where, of course, things took a turn for the worse.

    I was a junior science officer aboard the TI Manifest, the space installation that is now about 65% in the Marianas Trench, when the crab people ordered a meeting with the chief science officer, Admiral Bening, along with the cadre of senior level scientists. I was called to join because Bening was grooming me for senior level advancement within the burgeoning exploratory xenobiology field (not re: the crab people, but more for possible alien life forms found on the planets we were exploring at the time).

    The crab people were short. The tallest one was a lithe female standing around 1.3 meters. They all had the broad abdomens that crabs typically have, a single abdomen with eyes and antennae sticking out the front, except that the crab people are also bipedal and, over millions of years of evolution, their second and third sets of legs became vestigial, dangling helplessly from their sides like the tyrannosaurs of the dinosaur age. They worked, but were used mainly for communication; the crab people utilized a language of simple words coupled with intricate sign language. Admiral Bening was at the meeting where they brought a deaf colleague, Dr. Sybari, who was able to achieve communication with the crabs twice as fast as prior attempts.

    The crab people wore no clothes and their exoskeletons were vibrant, full of different colorings. The females were bigger and more colorful than the males, and did all the talking. And talk they did: it was at this meeting where we learned that the Crustatians were performing a galactic survey of the Milky Way and discovered us, the only sentient life forms in the entire galaxy. Hard to describe the level of nihilism that passed through the science crew when we heard that–there’s something about a giant crab who can snap her way through the universe that made us not doubt their ability to discern how much life was in an entire galaxy.

    They found us and found that we were apes. Hominids. Mammals. Soft, squishy meat bags. And they were … disappointed. The only way I can think to describe it is like when your favorite horse breaks a leg and, even though you love it, you know you have to kill it. The Crustatians looked at us like that, and told us that apes were not the apex of evolution. Crabs were. That meant that we would not progress to the apex of evolution. They sounded sad when they told us this, their soft vocalizations coupled with the weary limpness in their limbs.

    And then they started killing us.

    ++

    Paul awoke on a bed with a blinding headache that seemed to ripple down into his shoulder and left side. He moved to press his hand against his head to ease the pain but found that his arms were tied to the bed frame. As were his legs. Even his head was pressed back with some kind of strap against his forehead. The most he could do was turn slightly left or right to survey his surroundings.

    The room he was in was dirty and smelled of brine and seawater. This was a perpetual effect of the crab people–their colonies were mostly established along the beach and especially in estuaries, but some also in more distant lands like forests and mountains. Regardless, they all smelled like the ocean.

    Eventually Paul realized he was in a medical room, though one repurposed for crab people. There was a bed beside him; Laura was in that bed, but unconscious, her head facing away from Paul. Her skin looked sickly but Paul couldn’t place why.

    “You have questions,” said a voice. The vocalization was a crab person, one chosen to speak with humans. Their voice had a permanent sort of “buzzing” sound to it, making “questions” sound more like “quezztions.”

    The unique clicking of crab person footsteps approaching. One of their “liaisons,” crab people who wear clothes, try to integrate with human culture. It was wearing a lab coat and a stethoscope that it could not use as it did not have human ears. It was male, its two bulbous eyes moving back and forth quickly, studying Paul’s body in the bed.

    “What are you doing?” Paul asked. “Why am I bound like this? What’s going on?!”

    “You are not wize to run from uzz,” the crab person replied. “Your true evoluzzun has begun. Zee your zizter.”

    The crab person took their claw and gently ran it under the strap holding Paul’s head. With a quick clack, the strap broke. Paul turned to look at his sister Laura in her own bed. “Laura! What did they do to you?!”

    Laura stirred, then turned to face her brother. Where her human eyes once sat were now two bulbous black eyes, sticking out from stalks. Above, on her forehead, two baby antennae were growing.

    “Paul? What’s happening?”

    Paul felt a stabbing in his arm and turned frantically to watch the crab person pushing a syringe full of what looked like brackish water into his body. “The true evoluzzun beginzz,” they said.

    “You bastards! You fucking bastards!” was all Paul could get out before the liquid inside him wracked him with pain until he fell unconscious.

    ++

    So, now we are entering the new era of humanity. Our own carcinization, forced upon us by a benevolence of the King Crab, who pities us for our poor evolutionary divergence. All of these other creatures saw the beauty of the crab–why not humans? We, who can’t even fit our wisdom teeth in our fucking jaws anymore.

    I hope when the crab people find you, that they are merciful and kill you quickly, or deem you worthy of carcinization. Because they will find you, eventually.

  • cold shower

    went for cold shower this
morning, one knob twisted
until i could bear it; so
you seek the lurch in your
throat, the one that cripples
armies bound for moscow.

think of mason jars,
perched under the eaves
& filled with every last
thought you're waiting to
ferment into something useful.

i would've crossed the alps
for you, on elephantback,
were it not for the condition
of my shoes.

& then i wrenched my spirit
out of permafrost & set
in front of the hearth, &
waited, & waited, until it
bloomed again.

still see frostbite along the
petal edges, reminders of cold
showers & cold winters.

  • Explaining the Karmic Balance of the Wish Spell

    This is (hopefully) an ongoing series of posts within the world of my D&D campaign setting, Avo. Peruse the wiki.

    From a lecture by Professor Cerapham di Lien at the Conjuric Academy in Valwyria, 13 Midspring 3308. Transcribed by Lenna Whirk, St.B.Est.

    We’ve all heard it before: word your wishes carefully. We know that the more powerful the thing wished, the worse it will backfire. There are many, many stories out there of your local country bumpkin discovering a monkey’s paw in the fields, making a wish to become rich, only to discover that the treasury in Neven has been completely emptied of its gold. Or the chance meeting between a prince and a dao, or a djinni, and making a wish to marry the most beautiful princess in the world, only to find out that the princess’s father is a tyrant warlord, and the marriage has incited his anger, leading to a decades long war that ends up getting both the prince and princess killed.

    If the latter example sounds like a joke to you, you need to revisit your Letoran history books.

    So, why does wish come with some sort of cost? It is the only spell in our canon that does so, and the cost is exponential; the larger the wish, the more the cost. In addition, there’s a roughly one-third chance that if you cast wish, you may never be able to cast it again! Why is that? You’d think that after thousands of years, we would have been able to come up with some way of circumventing such an issue, yes?

    Well, the answer to this is somewhat fascinating because, in essence, wish is the only arcane spell bound to divine reaction. Note that I did not say it is a divine spell. This is surprisingly rare; most spells of a divine nature do not cross into arcane territory unless the caster has specialized in such weaving; spells of healing, for example, are simply untouchable by plain wizards, no matter their skill with magic. And while wish, intrinsically, is strictly arcane in nature (and, in truth, is unknowable by divine spellcasters unless they specialize in arcana), extrinsically, wish, and spellcasting in general Post-Catastrophe, is bound by the divine law. To cast it is to dip into the divine karmic balance which was codified during the Catastrophe. It is, in essence, a request to the divine will.

    Before the Catastrophe, spellcasting was at its height of power, and many of those spells beyond our ken today, of the renowned tenth through thirteenth grade, were sufficiently powerful that the only way they could be cast successfully was if sacrifice was woven into the spell itself, whether intended or not. One such spell, reality warp, was a twelfth grade spell which, when cast, fundamentally changed the nature of reality within a certain range. One could, for instance, exchange up for down, left for right. One could make rocks edible, or make a tree turn a body into thin strands the closer one approached it. And these are the things we are able to comprehend! In truth, reality warp was capable of changing reality into something so fundamentally and completely foreign to our minds that it could make the viewer–or taster, or smeller, et cetera–go mad, instantly, with no recourse. One story goes that a wizard who cast this spell went so mad that her brain literally melted and seeped out of her own nostrils. In short, the sacrifice was one’s own mind, and the chance of this happening was roughly equal to 25%! Imagine, casting the fireball spell and having a one in four chance of it exploding in your face instead. The Age of Magic was extraordinary.

    Obviously, since it was the gods who hold dominion over reality, a spell capable of fundamentally changing it was not ideal, in their eyes. So it was that during the Catastrophe the gods suddenly and irrevocably revoked our jurisdiction over these grades of spells. Gone were the days of wizards holding the ultimate power over the worlds in which they lived. Spells were since curated, so to speak, by the gods, to ensure that mortal beings could not devastate the world on their own.

    However, within the upper echelon of spell grades lies the only outlier to potential world devastation: wish, and with it, the potential for danger. Why the gods left this spell within our grasp is unknown. Based on my own research, there are two rising and competing theories: one is that wish was granted to mortals by the trickster gods, such as Asmodeus, Cyric, or Tymora, but in doing so, they warped the spell into its current incarnation for the express purpose of their own pleasure; that they, in short, enjoy seeing mortals bite off more than they can chew. The other theory is that the truth may lie within the primordials, whose kin, the genie, are sometimes capable of granting wishes outside of the purview of the gods, which may mean that the wish spell itself is beyond the purview of the gods, and instead is something that they are beholden to as much as you or I. This is a dangerous thread of thought to tread, however, for if the gods hold no dominion over wishes … who does? Surely not the forever-chained primordials!

    I trust the answer will never be laid cleanly before us by the gods, as distant and unseemly as they are. All we know about wishes is that the larger the scope, the worse off it will be for you in the long run. So please, students, should you ever be able to grasp the upper echelon of spell grades, remember the words, tried and true: word your wishes carefully.

  • 7.2.18 / cushions

    Cushions velcroed to the wooden bleachers.
    Close-cropped curly haired man gives no shit,
    He wrenches that cushion from its home
    Like an ICE officer, plopping himself down as if
    He owns the goddamn place.

  • thunderstorm 6.17.18

    You watch the rain and wind
    Make spotty waves against the concrete.
    The sky is resolved to sunder.
    Trapped in dark thoughts
    Your momentum a broad stalemate
    Between self and self.
    Above, the gray thunders,
    An aching crease in the heavens.
    Portents are all your own,
    You choose to see what you see in tea leaves,
    Just as you make the words
    On a Ouija board.

  • pettygrove park 5.22.18

    Commisserating over sunburns.
    He keeps his socks on;
    Thus, a stark contrast
    Between his feet and his legs.
    She laughs:
    “You’re cute but that’s gross.”
    On “cute” I know it’s on.
    And like a viper he strikes,
    I hear the rustle of clothing
    Against the wood bench
    As he sidles closer.
    “Can I ask you something?”
    In a voice above a whisper,
    Then whispers,
    Then the silence
    Of a first kiss(es).
    I’m reading Ursula Le Guin.
    They pull away and continue talking,
    And I listen for his interest in that.

  • waterfront 5.16.18

    Rest your head
    Against my shoulder.
    Rushing water was
    The first tv static,
    This I say a propos
    Of nothing.
    Kiss me with your pasta breath,
    Laugh a little less
    Each time we clack
    Our teeth together.
    When you ask me
    What’s wrong
    I am a boar
    Hunting for truffles.

  • 5.11.18 / to scott

    Where did you go
    And why
    And how
    Did it get to that point?
    When will we see you
    Alive
    Is that it?
    Did you fight with yourself
    In the darkness?