Unfurl the Jolly Roger and sail the high-seas in a high-heat hunt for a dreadful half-snake creature in K. R. Tempest’s “Exuviation” from Monster Smash anthology.

Don’t want to miss the launch? Follow the Monster Smash Kickstarter now!

I am so tired my eyes are gritty, lmao, but some reading did happen... not much, between Halloween and everything, I was really busy.

1. What are you currently reading?

• System Collapse (Murderbot 7) by Martha Wells: oh, the untreated PTSD of it all.
• Soul Vibration vol. 3 by Dr. Solo: I'm done with the main story now, just reading the extras. Considering they don't actually get together until two pages before the end of the book, I'm really hoping at least one of the extras includes some couple fluff but so far there hasn't been any, sigh. The ml's pov was nice tho.
• 天官赐福 revised edition vol. 1 by 墨香铜臭: so close to 50% through vol. 1. so close. I'm almost done with the Gambler's Den scene now, for an idea of where that puts me.

2. What have you recently finished reading?

• Soul Vibration vol. 2 by Dr. Solo.
• From Far Away vol. 11 - 14: finished my reread. I still love this one. I wish we could get these kinds of consequences for bad people in real life, too.

3. What are you planning to read next?

Novels: A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett.

Physical graphic novels: idek I can't see what's on top of the pile from here but. that.

Digital graphic novels: the next volume of Golden Kamuy, My Isekai Life, and Gachiakuta are all due imminently, because I read so little last week. oops.

In honor of Transgender Awareness Month, Elise Carlson has put together this awesome bundle of fics by trans and nonbinary authors – 27 books for $27, a savings of 76%!

Get your awesome bundle by November 15th!

a guest post by Lucy K. R.

The spirits of writing challenges past, present, and future

NaNoWriMo is dead, to begin with.

Oh, it still stings to say it! But life is change, and NaNoWriMo, or “National Novel Writing Month,” is dead, which means that there’s a hole in the world of writing challenges. For some, it’s a small, distant crack in the sidewalk, for others, a dire wound, and for still more it seems to be a Junji Ito-esque horror—an inescapable absence, desperate to be filled.

For me, it’s not quite any of those things.

In my hometown, I once went to a funeral home up on a hill. These days, when I drive past that hill there’s a wacky arm flailing inflatable tube man up on it, advertising the new dispensary that’s replaced the funeral home. That is NaNoWriMo to me. Something that was personal to me, that many people visited and many more never did, that some people surely disliked, and that eventually became a mockery of itself.

How does something like that happen? And where does one go from there?

Part One: The Spirit of Writing Challenges Past

I suspect that writing challenges are as old as writing itself. Perhaps they’re even older, if one considers storytelling a similar art. But there’s a reason the Ghost of Christmas Past takes Scrooge to his school and not back to ancient times.

In 1999, Chris Baty gathered a group of 21 friends to run a little writing challenge. This much has been widely shared and reported. But even that stretches back too far for me. The Ghost walks me back to the empty university hallways, where I’m camped out with my tiny laptop, typing furiously instead of attending my lecture classes. I was 20 years old in November 2009, when I put too much weight into a writing challenge in the hopes of “proving” that I could be an author.

It breaks my heart a little to look at how much weight I put on that challenge. I remember writing through my whole life. Stories have always been so, so important to me, especially as a person who struggled in her youth with being misunderstood. And yet, because no one had ever said the words “wow, you should be a writer” to me the way they had with other nouns like “musician,” “scientist,” “therapist,” or even “lawyer,” I sat there, back hunched, trying to prove I could do it to a world that wasn’t waiting for proof.

The Spirit of Writing Challenges Past standing next to me wears a horned helmet and a pensive expression.

“This is what NaNoWriMo was for,” he says. “It was never supposed to be a one-size-fits-all ‘this is how you write a novel’ answer. It was meant to be a lesson. Proof that a book is just a thing a person writes, and all it takes is for you to sit down and write it.”

The me of 2009, desperately scrawling down what I envisioned as the first of my fantasy trilogy, might be a minor tragedy to look back upon, but it made the me of that time so desperately happy.

As I went back through my NaNoWriMo history to make sure I had my dates correct for this article, I watched myself grow up beside NaNo. The spirit sat beside me all the while, watching the years perform their terrible march.

I went from a participant to a Municipal Liaison (a community volunteer helping to organize, inspire, and assist writers in your region). I hosted kickoff events and write-ins, gave interviews, moderated online groups and forum discussions, comforted and encouraged first-timers and formed playful rivalries with other authors as we cheered each other on. I didn’t just prove to myself that I could write a novel—I made writing a part of who I was, and at a central point of that belief stood the writing challenge that had gotten me started.

I think about those first 21 people who did NaNoWriMo sometimes. I wonder how long they kept playing along, as it ballooned from 21 to 100,000 people, to over 400,000, and inevitably to collapse. However long they stayed with it, I know that it must have been magical, for a time. It was for me.

On my bookshelf sits a copy of Chris Baty’s book No Plot? No Problem! I’m quoted in it, from my time as a Municipal Liaison, giving decent but not groundbreaking advice. It was the first time I saw my name in a book, and I promised myself when my copy came in that it wouldn’t be the last.

I stepped down after a few years as ML. The cracks were beginning to show in NaNoWriMo. The organization was too big. Municipal Liaisons held a lot of potential power, and safety concerns were cropping up. Sponsors of the event were more and more often accused of trying to get rich off of aspiring authors. The forums became clogged, if you could actually get anyone in your community onto the forum. More and more, the internet was funneling down from a beautiful network of spaces to play and explore into a conglomerate of four websites hungry for your information, your work, your attention.

Even as the event got too big, the internet got too small for it. It felt inevitable.

In the last few years that NaNoWriMo existed, I stopped winning the challenge. 50,000 words slipped out of my reach again.

The Spirit of Writing Challenges Past fades, leaving two books on my shelf. One, the Chris Baty book I was quoted in. The other, a hand-stapled zine I printed out of The Nesting Ground: Chapter One my very first novel’s very first chapter. I keep them together.

Part Two: The Spirit of Writing Challenges Present

If the Spirit of Writing Challenges Past showed up with a charming blue viking helmet on, the spirit of writing challenges present shows up with two of them balanced on top of each other, overcompensating. She continually tries to remove the hats, but they keep ending up back on her head.

“Nature abhors a vacuum,” she notes.

The lack of NaNoWriMo certainly left a hole in the world of writing challenges—particularly writing challenges for people writing original fiction. Fandoms are a different beast.

In 2025, when NaNoWriMo finally announced that they were shutting down, my local area’s novel-writing month Discord group boldly announced that we would carry on writing in November as though nothing had changed!

If anyone did, they never said anything.

That same year, three other writing groups I was in announced they’d be doing the classic NaNo challenge regardless of the root organization’s collapse. All but one of those crumbled as well. The one that didn’t, I still washed out of. On websites like Facebook and Twitter, a dozen half-renamed copycats appeared, all trying to fill the massive void of suddenly empty shoes. I don’t think it’s unfair to extrapolate that a similar percentage of these must also have fallen apart.

But even if NaNoWriMo hadn’t died so spectacularly and publicly, even if the website hadn’t shut down and vanished, perhaps in the modern writing world it had already been doomed to failure.

Quantity has always been king in a NaNoWriMo challenge. I remember watching with eyes wide in 2009 as the fastest writers powered towards a 50,000 word story written in a single day rather than a whole month. At the time, that amount of words was one I had only achieved over the course of years in fanfictions largely devoted to pleasing their fans rather than carrying out my own vision. The concept of cheating was, of course, mentioned. But the winners’ perks of NaNoWriMo when I started participating were limited to such things as “A certificate in a PDF format where you can add your own name to it!” and “you can buy yourself a T-shirt that says winner and not be lying!”

Even then, people speculated endlessly about whether writers were cheating. In a world where so many people so happily lie to themselves about whether typing a prompt into a plagiarism machine counts as creation, could a writing challenge based on quantity of words have survived? Or would those of us with 80 wpm writing paces be chased out of writing sprint groups by AI accusations?

None of this is to say that there are no more writing challenges, or to belittle those that have been running for decades. But it is to say this: When I started writing this section, I couldn’t bring to mind a single non-prompt-list writing challenge. That isn’t to say they aren’t out there—it’s to say I don’t know them, despite being in the writing world, surrounded by people who love writing. To someone who isn’t part of that environment, would they even find the prompt challenges? Would they know they should try, even if they’ve never tried before?

When NaNoWriMo shut down, an open doorway into the world of writing closed. Are there other writing challenges trying to re-open it? Or is the spirit of the present only interested in those of us who are already here?

Part Three: The Spirit of Writing Challenges Future

This Spirit is always shrouded. Whimsy and the future are rarely bedfellows. This one has a business card, however, which I haven’t encountered before. It reads:

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. —Edward Abbey”

“I know,” I say, squeezing the thin card between my fingers. “It got too big. It could never last. There was too much chance someone would abuse it, it was too expensive to keep it going, there were too many people. But the point was never infinite growth! It was about trying to welcome people! It was about trying something new and hard, and seeing who you were when you did it! It was about writing because you can instead of because someone else is making you!”

Spirits of the Future never speak, only gesture. This spirit twirls its finger until I flip over the card.

“Change is the only constant. —Heraclitus (mistranslated)” reads the back.

Writing is, inherently, challenging. Putting the words here, now, on this page, has been a struggle. The joy of a writing challenge is knowing that the struggle is shared. Someone else out there, whether in the same room or so far away, is fighting to put those words in order too. We are all of us writers doing a mental version of chess boxing against empty pages, trying to find the balance between brute force and beauty.

While writing this portion of this blog post, reflecting on the future, I stopped for the first time to wonder why I had framed the story of writing challenges this way. It’s well before the holiday season still, and I’m hardly a Scrooge when it comes to writing challenges. Was it just that NaNoWriMo is dead, and that I wanted to play on a great opening line? I could be forgiven that, I think—it’s a great opener—but I don’t actually think that’s why I was drawn to the three ghosts as a format.

In A Christmas Carol, though Scrooge certainly isn’t in charge of Christmas, he is in a position to be a meaningful part of it, should he choose to be. I’m not in charge of writing challenges as a concept, nor even in charge of any writing challenges right now, but I used to be. I used to be, and I loved doing it. Even outside of being a Municipal Liaison, I used to run an overnight twelve-hour fandom charity live-writing event called Do Good Weirdly, and write prompts for my friends every May!

“I understand,” I tell the spirit, gazing at a shadow of myself, sitting alone in front of a blank screen. “I see what you’re trying to tell me. It doesn’t have to be big, or perfect. It just has to help. To make it exciting, to make it less lonely, to prove that you can do it, you can do hard things! A writing challenge doesn’t have to be something made for everyone, with all the responsibility in the world on the shoulders of those running it. Sometimes it’s just some friends, trying something new!”

NaNoWriMo happened, and then it was over. Now, it seems everyone is trying to resurrect it, a scattershot dozen copycats arising every day. Is that really all we have to look forward to?

Halfway through writing this, I got in touch with a couple of friends to see if they wanted to try something new together. We’re making plans for a writing workshop this November, sharing and editing and refining short pieces together to hone our craft. It’s a new challenge for us, untested, unverified, with no testimonials and only a few of us playing along. It’s not going to leave us with the next great novel in our laps.

But we’ll be sitting down, trying something hard, putting words on paper, and we won’t be alone. All it took was an invitation. Maybe you know someone who’d like to be invited?

Happy writing, everyone.

Are you ready to join the hunt for the Bigfoot in T. Shepard’s “Binding Bigfoot”? The pics might end up blurry, but the sensations will be in 4k.

Don’t want to miss the launch? Follow the Monster Smash Kickstarter now!

This line from S. Corduroy’s “Apricity, Scales, and Other Sensations that Feel Like Home” is a little something to whet your appetite for the Monster Smash anthology! Where do you think it’ll land on the scale from 🌶️ to 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️? Don’t want to miss the launch? Follow the Monster Smash Kickstarter now!

hokay, the fuck did I read this week... 

1. What are you currently reading?

• Soul Vibration vol. 2 by Dr. Solo: this starts with what, because I (intentionally) saw spoilers, I know is miscommunication shenanigans. Blah. But I'm still enjoying it over all. I appreciate how resilient the mc is. Like granted he's totally wrong about what's actually going on right now, but he's also really trying not to let it get him down or impact his behavior, and that part is kinda nice, none of this "I'm gonna be a sullen brat over this thing I don't like" that's so common in the BL I read.
• System Collapse (Murderbot 7) by Martha Wells: I only just started this yesterday and don't really feel like I have a sense of what's going on yet.
• 天官赐福 revised edition vol. 1 by 墨香铜臭
• Chicago Manual of Style 18th ed.: I didn't make as much progress as I'd like to have, and now I'm stalling again, but oh well. I'll probably pause it again.

2. What have you recently finished reading?

• Fugitive Telemetry (Murderbot 6) by Martha Wells: finished the audiobook yesterday. This one was fine, but didn't feel as special as 4 or 5 did. I guessed the category of the killer correctly but misjudged which member of said category was responsible. Justice for [redacted], I'm sorry I thought you were a murderer hun you're doing great actually.
• Soul Vibration vol. 1 by Dr. Solo
• From Far Away vol. 1 to 10 by Kyoko Hikawa: watching the anime made me want to reread the series and here I am, only 4 volumes to go. I still really love this one. I wish evil was this easy to remove from the real world, sigh.
• On Bended Knee by Ruri Fujikawa: completely unmemorable modern BL about a corporate heir and his bodyguard who are also childhood friends. Like I had to look at the blurb to remind myself what it was about. For that, it wasn't bad, just absolutely nothing about it stuck out to me even just 4 days later.
• That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime vol. 27 by Fuse
• My Isekai Life vol. 18 and 19 by Ponjea and Shinkoshoto

3. What are you planning to read next?

Novels: my hold of A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett came through, so after I finish the three volumes of Soul Vibration, that'll be up next. I doubt I'll manage even that much in the next week tho.

Physical graphic novels: I made a dire mistake... I went to the library again. 🤣 In my defense, that's my early voting location. I was there to vote. Then I tripped and fell and my arms filled with books, and once I touched them the rules are I have to borrow them, right? It's not my fault. The gravity must be off there or something. Anyway, I came home with seven graphic novels (I told myself I wasn't allowed to borrow more than 5, I didn't do that bad really 🤣🤣) and the top of the pile is Orion by Ngozi Ukazu. I'll finish my umpteenth reread of From Far Away first, tho.

Digital graphic novels from Libby: I only have four loans and none are due in under a week, so idk. I'll just mood read.

Happy Intersex Awareness day! We are once again back with a few books we love that include intersex characters. There are far, far too few worthwhile books in this category, so if you know more, please do let us know about ‘um!! The contributors to the list are Shadaras and an anonymous contributor.

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

Aster has little to offer folks in the way of rebuttal when they call her ogre and freak. She’s used to the names; she only wishes there was more truth to them. If she were truly a monster, she’d be powerful enough to tear down the walls around her until nothing remains of her world.

Aster lives in the lowdeck slums of the HSS Matilda, a space vessel organised much like the antebellum South. For generations, Matilda has ferried the last of humanity to a mythical Promised Land. On its way, the ship’s leaders have imposed harsh moral restrictions and deep indignities on dark-skinned sharecroppers like Aster. Embroiled in a grudge with a brutal overseer, Aster learns there may be a way to improve her lot – if she’s willing to sow the seeds of civil war.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver’s license…records my first name simply as Cal.”

So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction.

The Day of Revolution by Mikiyo Tsuda

Kei Yoshikawa is a feisty young boy, troubled by problems at home and annoyed at school. One day after a sudden fainting spell, Kei is examined by the doctor and given shocking news – he is actually supposed to be a girl!

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

A lone human ambassador is sent to the icebound planet of Winter, a world without sexual prejudice, where the inhabitants’ gender is fluid. His goal is to facilitate Winter’s inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the strange, intriguing culture he encounters…

Find these and other books on our Goodreads book shelf, our Pagebound.co list, or buy them through the Duck Prints Press Bookshop.org affiliate page.

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the first in a series of guest posts by Rascal Hartley.

editor’s note: Duck Prints Press is highly anti-gen-AI in all usages, but we recognize it’s very easy to say “don’t do that” and very hard, for people who have gotten used to using a tool, to actually stop. That is the spirit behind this series of posts: not simply “don’t do that,” but a concrete guide for people who have gotten into the habit of using generative AI to do their heavy lifting and want to stop but aren’t sure how to do so. We encourage people who have not ever used generative AI to continue to not do so, but also, we want to arm people who have used this tool and no longer want to with the tools and supports they need to stop. We recognize that “just stop” is rarely helpful advice for people habituated to a poor practice, and that is the why we are making these posts. You, person using genAI who doesn’t want to but isn’t sure how to break away: you can quit. And these posts can help.

Hi! I’m glad you’re here.

I want to start off by removing some of the overwhelm of approaching writing on your own. Writing can feel like a huge beast to tackle, but it isn’t. I promise it isn’t. It can be broken down into steps, and, if we’re being honest, sometimes you can skip some of them. It all boils down to what is needed to tell the story you want to tell.

That is not to say that this will be easy, but it is possible.

Let me assure you, firstly, that perfect grammar and spelling are not required. Editors exist for a reason, and the reason is that the burden does not fall to you. All you have to do is write. We will cover basic editing in a later blog, but for this one, I really just want to hammer home one point:

It should not be perfect.

Writing feels overwhelming because there is so much to do, and “all of it needs to be done to a certain standard” only makes it harder. But it doesn’t need to be. To repurpose a line from one of my favorite fanfics (that link will take you to Bilbo/Thorin smut, just fyi), “There is no room for perfection in a good story.”

AI makes (mostly) technically correct works. It makes them “good enough,” and it makes them fast. The result is there soon after you have the idea. That’s pretty hard to beat. Every writer I know has expressed the wish to just take an idea from their head and transpose it instantly onto paper, which makes the anti-AI stances seem kinda hypocritical, right?

Except I don’t want someone else’s words on that paper. If I did, I’d hire a ghost writer. I want my own words there. And if you’re here, I think you do, too. If you’re here, you have a story worth telling, and you want to tell it yourself. And that is scary. Stepping away from the easy way to do things the way they should be done is really, really scary.

But that’s okay.

We’ll do it scared.

Over this blog series, I’m aiming to guide you in going from idea to finished draft. But bear in mind that, though you’re not using AI to do it, you’re not doing it alone. There is a wonderful community of writers out there who will cheer you on and offer help. Rope in your friends, your pets, and your rubber ducky (seriously, THE best writing companion you could have) and remind yourself that you CAN write a story.

After all, we’re humans. We invented stories.