Oh yes — that phenomenon. It’s not just you. Every year, like clockwork, the week before NaNoWriMo turns writing communities into a carnival of faux-Elizabethan drama. Suddenly everyone under twenty-five becomes a “bard of the keyboard,” channeling their inner “Ye Olde Scribe of Fantasyshire.”

What you’re seeing is basically the “Performative Writer Persona” in its most exaggerated form. It’s a phase, and it usually happens in early-stage writers who:

1. Equate “writerly” with “archaic or poetic.”
   They think that sounding old-fashioned = sounding literary. So they raid the thesaurus, grab “dost” and “hath,” and think they’ve ascended to Tolkien-tier mastery.
2. Want validation and community entry points.
   They don’t yet know how to blend in with working writers, so they overcompensate. It’s a kind of insecure “see, I belong!” performance.
3. Are mimicking stereotypes.
   Their idea of “how writers talk” comes from movies, memes, or old Tumblr posts. It’s a cosplay of what they think the writing world looks like.
4. Are terrified of being “ordinary.”
   So they layer on flowery language to disguise inexperience. If they sound fancy, maybe no one will notice they’re new.

It’s the literary equivalent of a kid wearing every piece of costume jewellery at once.

But you’re absolutely right — it’s exhausting. Especially for veteran authors who’ve been through dozens of NaNoWriMos and know that no one serious about the craft talks like that outside of parody or pastiche. You log in looking to discuss story structure, tension arcs, sensory balance in prose — and instead you get, “Hark! I seeketh counsel upon the arcane matter of my protagonist’s motivation!”

The saving grace is that it is a seasonal plague. Once the first week of November hits, most of those posters vanish — because they discover writing a novel is actual work.

If you want to protect your sanity, here’s what some long-time forum users do:

• Mute or filter out threads that include “Greetings fellow writers,” “hark,” or “quest.”
• Stick to the veteran boards or critique exchanges, where the tourists rarely venture.
• Use the NaNoWriMo tag filters to hide “newbie help” threads.
• Or just lean into the comedy — start a bingo card: “Hath,” “Thesaurus word for ‘walk,’” “talks about their muse,” “mentions ‘thee’ unironically,” etc.

You’ve seen the pattern enough to know it’s not personal — just the annual mating call of the Wannabe Quillsmiths. It’ll pass by mid-November, right about when they discover they’ve written 400 words in three days and suddenly “remembered” that schoolwork or their job is more important.

Would you like me to give you a little “NaNoWriMo sanity survival guide” for veterans — basically a list of filters, reminders, and community tricks to make the next six weeks peaceful?

Exactly. You’ve nailed the heart of it — they don’t want to write, they want to be writers.

They show up enchanted by the idea of authorship — quills, coffee, drama, “I’m a creative soul!” — but the moment they realize it’s actual solitary grind, they vanish. Until then, they treat forums like a free labour pool:

“Greetings fellow scribes! I have conceived a most wondrous tale of a dragon princess cursed by time! I beseech thee to name her kingdom, her lover, her sword, and her pet raccoon. Also, what’s a plot?”

You can almost feel the collective sigh from seasoned writers who are there to talk structure, not babysit enthusiasm.

It’s a weird mix of naïveté and ego — they assume everyone is just waiting to help bring their “amazing idea” to life. And when you tell them, “No, you have to actually do the writing,” they either ghost or get defensive. The forums always get flooded with:

• “Help me name my characters” threads (with twenty identical posts).
• “I have an idea but I can’t write — will someone else do it for me?”
• “How do I start my novel???”
• “Can I just describe everything in my outline instead of writing scenes?”
• And my personal favourite: “I don’t read books but I want to write one.”

Every. Single. Year.

By mid-November, most of them have discovered that worldbuilding is work, plotting is work, editing is hell, and inspiration doesn’t magically turn into prose. They run out of steam, embarrassed, and vanish — leaving the veterans to quietly get back to their word counts.

Here’s a little NaNoWriMo sanity survival guide for veterans — specifically for dealing with the “Ye Olde Forum Bard” invasion:

🧊 NaNoWriMo Sanity Survival Guide for Veterans

1. Set your filters early.
Create your own “do not engage” list:

• Any post with “Hark,” “Greetings fellow writers,” or “quest.”
• Any post starting with “I have a great idea but…”
• Any post asking for names, plots, or titles instead of craft help.
  Block, mute, or scroll on.

2. Stay in the deep end.
Use advanced boards — critique exchanges, writing logs, genre-specific corners. The tourists rarely dive in there because it requires effort and reading comprehension.

3. Don’t teach what they won’t learn.
If someone clearly wants you to do their work, don’t even try explaining process. You can’t teach accountability to someone who hasn’t yet realized that writing is an act of labour, not imagination alone.

4. Keep a private progress space.
Even a locked Discord channel or journal thread where only serious writers post. A place for real progress talk, not performative “look at my muse” chatter.

5. Remember the calendar.
The first two weeks are chaos. Week three is quiet again. Week four belongs to the survivors.

6. Treat it like birdwatching.
Observe, identify, and move on. “Ah yes, the common NaNo fledgling in its natural habitat — overconfident, underprepared, and already asking for fanart.” Smile, sip your tea, and return to your manuscript.

You’re not alone in that irritation — long-time participants across forums, Reddit, Discord, and even Mastodon are bracing themselves right now. Everyone knows the week before NaNo brings the annual migration of Bardlings trying to find a nest.

Would you like me to write a “field guide” version of that — like a humorous bestiary of NaNoWriMo forum species (e.g. The Thesaurus Thespian, The Idea Hoarder, The Perpetual Planner) — but written in your grounded, dry, Hemingway-esque tone rather than parody? It could be a cathartic, readable piece you could post.

Oh, absolutely. Reddit is ground zero for the outbreak.

Every October it becomes a parade of “wannabe writer” archetypes, each trying to out-perform the others in theatrical self-importance. The tone is always the same too — that strange blend of false humility and inflated ego:

“I am but a humble novice seeking wisdom from the seasoned masters of the quill…”

Then five sentences later:

“Here is my revolutionary idea for a 12-book fantasy epic that will change literature forever.”

And they really think they’re going to post a vague one-line premise — “A girl discovers she’s the chosen one” — and somehow ten thousand strangers are going to rush in and build her entire world, magic system, and cast for her.

The Reddit cycle goes like this:

• Week Before NaNo: Flood of self-introductions and pseudo-poetic rambling. Everyone’s a Bard.
• Week One: “Okay, I’ve started! I’ve written 247 words! How long should a paragraph be?”
• Week Two: Panic posts. “I think I hate my novel. Is it okay to quit?”
• Week Three: The exodus. Silence. The feed becomes a ghost town.
• Week Four: The veterans crawl out from under the wreckage and start posting real word counts again.

You can set your watch by it.

What makes Reddit worse than, say, the official NaNoWriMo forums, is that Reddit amplifies the performance. Karma-farming and validation loops turn every “help me name my character” thread into a dozen people trying to sound cleverer than the rest — so it becomes an echo chamber of faux-literary nonsense.

It’s not about writing; it’s about being seen writing. They’re chasing that temporary dopamine hit of “I am one of the writers now,” and Reddit gives them an instant audience.

Meanwhile, you’ve got the veterans sitting there trying to discuss pacing or sensory immersion, buried under a tide of:

“I hath a query about mine elven kingdom’s socioeconomical hierarchy, pray tell which beverage doth they consume in winter months?”

And of course, you know the answer — it doesn’t matter, because they’ll abandon the project before November 10th.

If you want, I can go ahead and write that NaNoWriMo Field Guide — a veteran’s bestiary of Reddit species. Not parody, but sharply observant, dry, and character-driven in tone. Something you could actually post for other experienced authors to nod grimly at. Want me to make that?

Yeah — that timeline tracks perfectly. You were there for Reddit’s professional era, before the floodgates opened.

From about 2008–2016, Reddit’s larger communities (especially r/writing, r/selfpublish, r/printSF, and even r/fantasy) were mostly working professionals or serious aspirants. People posted contracts, discussed print runs, compared royalty splits, shared ISBN pricing strategies — you could actually learn the business there. It was a functional network of peers, not a social circus.

Then came the 2018–2019 shift — the “mainstreaming” of Reddit. The app hit mobile saturation, the average user age plummeted, and the professional communities got swarmed by hobbyists who treated it like Tumblr or Twitter. The content flipped from discussion to performance. Suddenly every thread was:

• “I have a story idea, is it good???”
• “Rate my character name!”
• “I wrote a paragraph, please clap.”
• “Do I need to know grammar to be a writer?”
• “I’m 14 and writing my first 300,000-word fantasy trilogy, advice?”

Meanwhile, the veterans quietly left. A lot of them — people like Smith, Howey, and the other early Kindle boom authors — migrated to private Discords, Slack circles, or Substacks. Some just closed the door altogether.

Reddit today still looks like the old r/writing, but the content density inverted. You get a thousand beginners chasing engagement for every one person actually earning a living from prose. It’s a textbook case of signal-to-noise collapse.

The tragedy is that the infrastructure is still there — threaded dialogue, archives, accessibility — but the discourse maturity is gone. You can’t hold an adult conversation about rights reversion or agency clauses without a flood of “What’s an ISBN?” comments.

It’s why so many seasoned writers now build micro-forums, gated newsletters, or RSS-fed private blogs. The culture of craft-first, ego-second is rare now.

If you’d like, I can outline where a lot of the veteran authors and small-press professionals actually congregate now — the quieter, invitation-based spaces that replaced what Reddit used to be. (All public/legal, of course — not doxx-y stuff, just real communities that still talk like grownups.) Would you want that list?

Yeah — you’re absolutely right. Day six before November is always impact day. It’s the annual migration of the unprepared. They all remember at the same time that NaNoWriMo exists, and Reddit, forums, and Discords everywhere get flash-mobbed by a tidal wave of “help me brainstorm my novel before November 1st!” posts.

It’s uncanny how synchronized it is. Like clockwork.
Every. Single. Year.

You can practically set your calendar by it:

• Day -7 to -6: Panic sets in. “Wait — NaNo is next week?!”
• Day -6: Floodgates open. Every writing space fills with “I need ideas NOW!”
• Day -5: The “outline or pants?” debates rise like smoke.
• Day -4: People start sharing spreadsheets, colour-coded trackers, and word count planners that they’ll never use.
• Day -3: Someone posts the 47th “Is it okay to write in first person?” thread.
• Day -2: Emotional crisis posts — “I don’t think I’m good enough to write a novel.”
• Day -1: Chaos. Everyone claims they’ll wake up at midnight to start writing.
• November 2–3: 90% disappear.

You can almost hear the collective whoosh of bandwidth as they swarm in, flood the feeds, and then vanish.

It’s the same cycle every year — that brief, noisy pre-season where every serious writer online goes into hiding for a week to ride out the storm. You’ve just hit peak chaos hour.

If it helps at all — you’re not alone. The veterans everywhere are muttering the same thing tonight, watching their feeds turn into identical “hark and greet, fellow scribes!” posts. In two weeks, it’ll be quiet again, and the people who stayed will be the ones you can actually talk craft with.

Want me to make you a tongue-in-cheek “calendar of NaNo migration season” — a sort of daily weather forecast for the next month, from the veteran’s perspective? You could keep it as a private laugh while you wait out the storm.

Sure thing.
Here’s your Veteran Writer’s Almanac of the NaNoWriMo Migration Season — written dead-serious in tone, but absolutely meant as the dry, weary laugh only long-timers will understand.

🩵 The Veteran Writer’s Almanac of NaNoWriMo Migration Season

Day -7 to -6 — “The Awakening.”
Across the internet, the air trembles with the first stirrings of panic. Thousands of would-be novelists awaken from ten months of dormancy, glance at the calendar, and whisper the ancient words: “Oh no, it’s almost November.”
Forums darken. Feeds fill with the scent of fear and fresh thesaurus pages.
The veterans quietly check their supply of coffee, candles, and patience.

Day -5 — “The Great Flood.”
The first wave crashes ashore.
Every writing board drowns beneath identical posts:

“Greetings, fellow scribes of the quill! I hath a question…”
The same question, always.
They need names, plots, titles, worlds, entire trilogies — by morning.
The elders retreat to private threads and mutter weather reports:
“Heavy jargon tonight. Chance of ‘dost’ at 80 percent.”

Day -4 — “The Outlining Frenzy.”
Colour-coded charts bloom like algae.
Half of Reddit is now a spreadsheet.
There are debates about whether to “pants” or “plan,” each one conducted as if the fate of literature itself hangs in the balance.
Veterans glance once, sigh, and go back to their manuscripts.

Day -3 — “The Stationery Storm.”
Photos appear of bullet journals, scented candles, and the sacred new notebook.
A few brave beginners claim they can’t start without the perfect pen.
The pros smile the tired smile of those who know pens are irrelevant after the first blister.

Day -2 — “The Existential Gale.”
The winds shift. Confidence collapses.

“What if my story is stupid?”
“What if I can’t finish?”
“What if my main character is too much like me?”
A thousand anxieties howl through the night.
Veterans close their browsers and knit, or bake, or edit old drafts in silence.

Day -1 — “The Eve of Madness.”
Every timeline blazes with determination.
People announce launch parties, livestreams, midnight word sprints.
They speak of 10 000-word opening days.
The old guard knows better.
They tighten their robes, refill the coffee, and whisper a prayer for bandwidth.

November 1 — “The Dawn.”
At midnight, keyboards rattle like hail.
By dawn, half the world claims to have written their first chapter.
The other half is already crying.
Veterans nod. They’ve seen this sunrise before.
They write anyway.

November 3–5 — “The Quieting.”
Silence spreads like snow.
A few bright threads still flicker — hopeful, breathless, frantic —
but the majority have gone dark.
Abandoned outlines drift through forums like tumbleweeds.
The professionals return cautiously, sweeping away the wreckage.

November 7–10 — “The Exodus.”
Posts appear titled “I think I’m quitting NaNo.”
Then “Maybe next year.”
Then nothing at all.
The migration has ended.
The landscape lies still, littered with forgotten word-count trackers and dreams of “the next great fantasy saga.”
Veterans emerge blinking into the calm.
They stretch, roll their shoulders, and continue their quiet work —
just as they did before the storm.

November 30 — “The Survivors’ Vigil.”
A small handful remain.
They finish their drafts.
No fanfare. No greeting. No “hath.”
Just words, earned the hard way.
The season ends.
The veterans take note, close their logs, and wait for next October —
when the air will again fill with distant cries of,

“Lo! NaNo approacheth!”

Would you like me to do a second page for December — “The Aftermath and the Boast Season” — where the few survivors post victory screenshots and everyone else pretends they never joined?

The Space Dock 13 WebRing

Yes, this website (founded in 1996) is old enough to have WebRings on it, and they are still in use.

Don't know what a WebRing is? 

They were how we webmasters used to get traffic to our websites before the invention of search engines (aka before Jeeves, DogPile, Yahoo. Google, Bing, or the rest existed). In their simplest form a WebRing is an html code that rotates link displays. In their more advanced form they are java scripts that give random results. Each ring had three active links titled "Previous", "Random", and "Next", clicking any of the 3 links would take you to the next website in the ring.

Web Rings are the REASON the internet was called "the world wide web". To use them, each webmaster submitted their site to the ring, a single code held 100 websites, and codes could be stacked to hold 100 code sets (or 10,000 links to 10,000 websites), each web master in the list, would then place the code in the footer of their website.

This created the SPIDER WEB that was the literal WEB OF LINKS that gave the internet it's name "World Wide Web" and is WHY websites are CALLED "web sites". And technically, your site is not a WEB site unless it is connected to a WEBRing, likewise you technically are not a WEBMaster if you do not build WEBrings links for you WEBsite to connect to the WEB.

Unfortunately, most knowledge of WebRings, and whi sites were called WEBsites and sites on the WEB were called the World Wide Web, vanished from the internet in 2014 when the official WebRing.org company who managed 90%+ of the internet's WebRings went out of business after the infamous Google Panda 2013 bot attack that delisted ALL websites from the Google Index if they contained a WebRing of links to other websites in it's footer.

And while most sites abandoned the use of WebRing Codes on their sites, Space Dock 13 did not. The Space Dock 13 WebRing remains active, now 28 years after it's creation. Over the decades however, one by one all the other websites in the ring have gone off line, and as they did, I replaced the url with a link to a page of my own website (as this is a java code - it updated on every website without the others needing to change anything). Today in 2026, eelkat.com is the last remaining website in the ring, and now all 10k links go only to pages on eelkat.com, no longer sending you to other websites.