Hey there Feral Writer! Welcome to FerUnWriMo: Feral Unhinged Writing Month, a rolling monthly challenge just for you!
What is it?
FerUnWriMo is a rolling monthly challenge, which means it’s every month. Or only one month. Or three months. You choose when you participate!
Do 12 months of the year, do 3, do one. Do a month on, a month off. IT IS UP TO YOU. I do it monthly because I am insane.
Who can join?
Anyone. Do you write? Congrats, you’re in!
What are the rules?
FERAL WRITERS DON’T NEED RULES
Okay, fine, here are some rules:
- Any project, any goal. There are no minimum word count requirements & you don’t need to start a new project. What do YOU feel is an unhinged, feral goal for you to strive for? Do that.
- Join in on the hashtag, the Trackbear Monthly Leaderboard, the Dreamwidth community, or the Discord — or all of the above. Your choice.
- Write anything you like. Finish that WIP, start a new novel, write a book of poems.
- Comparison is the thief of joy. This is for fun. If joining the monthly leaderboard is hurting your writing, then don’t do it. Don’t take it too seriously and don’t worry if someone is ahead of you. (Unless it spurs you on — then use that competitiveness!)
- Track whatever you like: words, chapters, hours, coffees consumed.
- Cheer on your fellow unhinged, feral writers.
- Celebrate goal-reaching wins, no matter the size.
- FerUnWriMo is compatible with other challenges! Do not feel you have to choose–you can haz all the challenges.
- Don’t be a jackass. We’re all writers & we wanna write. If you’re a jackass in the Discord or Dreamwidth community I will kick you. If you’re a jackass on social media, uh. I can’t do anything there but block you, and I will.
- I ask for this challenge if you are logging words in the monthly leaderboard they be actual words *you have written*. Which means if you are putting prompts into ChatGPT and using that to spew out words, those words *do not count* for FerUnWriMo.
- That said, I can’t control you and I am not your mother, and this is on the honour system. If you cheat you’re only cheating yourself.
Is that enough rules? Are we happy now?
GREAT! Go forth and WRITE ferally, word-monsters!
Places to Join
Here is your monthly (October 2024) join code for the Trackbear app:
(If this page is not updated in a timely manner for the month’s code, check the DREAMWIDTH community for the latest leaderboard!)
And here is your Discord invite link! It gives TEMPORARY membership until you are assigned a role, so don’t disconnect till then! (I have to do everything manually in my Discord, there is no automation, and I am a night owl on Pacific time.)
The hashtag on all social media that uses hashtags (Threads, X, Instagram, Facebook, maybe others? IDK) is #FerUnWriMo. Tag your update posts and find other feral writers!
Finally, here is a link to the Dreamwidth community. Are you on Dreamwidth? Join us there!
See you soon, unhinged word monsters!
-Katje, feral writer of wild worlds
Fine Print
FerUnWriMo is the brainchild of Katje van Loon, Feral Writer of Wild Worlds. It is not meant to encroach on anyone else’s writing challenge or community. It is a bit of fun, put together in the spirit of missing the old versions of certain other writing challenge communities, before they started digging their own graves.
AI Fine Print: I am AI-agnostic. I will not send a witch hunt after you for using it, nor do I particularly care one way or the other if you do use it or not. I am also not interested in joining either anti- or pro- camps at this time so please do not use this as a chance to “convince” (read: bully) me.
However, even being AI-agnostic, I do not understand why I would want to use genAI to “write” an entire book. Writing is the part I enjoy. It is not the part I want to outsource. Why would I ask a machine to take over the part I enjoy? Seems sus.
That said, there is a large difference between using genAI to write an entire book…and using it to help things along. Smooth out speed bumps. Unsnarl the tangles in the brain. Etc.
If you do genAI to help your writing along, that’s fine. Plenty of writers use it as a brainstorming tool to help get things unstuck in the grey matter.
What I am asking, in the spirit of this being a true writing challenge, is that the majority percentage of the words you log be words you actually wrote.
So if you used ChatGPT to brainstorm the title of a fictional TV show and those two words you put into your MS, unchanged? Yeah, that’s fine, it’s two words. Same thing if you use one of those name generators to come up with names for characters or places or taverns or whatever. You can still count the name of the planet you got from Fantasy Name Generators (or whatever) as part of your total word count. I’m not going to ask you to nickel and dime yourself down on word count.
You give ChatGPT prompts to write an entire story, and count every single one of those words as words you’ve “written”? No. This is a writing challenge and if you outsource the writing, you are not participating in the challenge.
I’m not coming down one way or another on if it “counts” as “writing” in general or the long run; I have no idea what the future will say about all this. But when it comes to this writing challenge, I say it doesn’t count. If you don’t like it, you can create your own writing challenge. With blackjack and hookers and genAI. Have fun.
Use your discretion/best judgment on if what you use it for counts, and modify your word count reports accordingly.