Young Writers Society

Hi folks,

It's that time of year again! April is almost upon us, which means we need to get planning for NaPo. PCrew & Co. had a meeting to brainstorm on the weekend, and we came away with lots of fabulous ideas! We're always open for some cross-crew collaboration, though, so feel free to chime in with input and ideas of your own.

Pre-NaPo Hype
> #Freindshippoems are always a fan favourite! They also advance the agenda of getting everyone to stop using capitalization or punctuation in their poetry, so, yknow, I won't complain.

> Last year we went for a jam theme for NaPo and a bunch of mods changed their profile pictures to jam jars and made cryptic #jammified wall posts for build-up to NaPo. This year, we were thinking of doing more of a cat café theme (@tatteredbones had a big say in this one, I won't lie), so if any mods reading this could change their avvies to coffee or cats or coffee AND cats in the next couple of weeks that would be splendid!



When It's Actually NaPo
The best part!

> LOTS of poetry write-ins. We're talking every single minute of every single day. @lliyah suggested we could form a rotation of mods who can swap out every couple of hours so that there's always someone running an official, mod-affiliated poetry jam - we will need ALL hands on deck for this though so if you could sign up over in this WFP (password: poetry 24/7) I will be FOREVER in your debt. (Seriously, you can hit me up for a review or a personalized haiku or $1,000,000 CAD any time <3)

> Nate offered to add in another genre in the publishing center for NaPo (Nate, if you're reading this, you're the best). alliyah already peer pressured him into adding a "chickens" genre a while ago, so that's off the list. I was thinking maybe "uncontrollable angst" or "whimsical stream-of-consciousness" or just plain "water" could be strong candidates. Thoughts? Concerns?

> @Plume had an amazing contest idea to see who can write a poem that sounds the most like it was generated by AI. If it's discovered that any contestants actually used AI software to create their entry they WILL be immediately disqualified. I'm not sure about the logistics on that, so if anyone techy (@Shady? @Liminality? @Carina if you are still alive?) has suggestions on how to screen entries for AI plagiarism, those would be greatly appreciated.

That's it so far! I'm really excited for this NaPo - I think we've got a lot of new and innovative ideas that will generate a lot of activity on the site. The people are gonna love it. So yeah, I'll leave it at that, but PCrew is wide open for suggestions and/or assistance in executing our plans!

Signing off,
-Seirre

Thanks for getting the ball rolling here Seirre - as mentioned, poetry crew has been VERY hard at work planning the best NaPo ever.

It's going to be FUN. FUN. FUN. !! So far the count-down is off to a great start, and I am absolutely thrilled at the HUGE poetry squad we've got on the Poetry Team this year.

One of my goals this year is to slowly eradicate capitalization from poetry, it's just so unnecessary! One idea I wanted to throw out there just for feedback is what if users were charged extra points per capital letter in their poem? ie. the base price of a poem is still 200 points, but if you want to capitalize a few pronouns it jumps to 220, if you're using sentence-casing, that'll cost you 300, and if you capitalize at the beginning of every line that'll cost 500 points. I just want to see YWSers writing the best poems they can, and unfortunately I'm not sure capital letters have a place in that.

As for the new genre - my vote is "uncontrollable angst" or "~posted mainly for the aesthetic~" but I know there's a lot of good options out there.

Want to re-itterate what Seirre said about signing in for a write-in slot - PLEASE DO! <3

Honestly guys, I have to admit though... there's been something kind of eating at my heart. Are we really going to go for cats for the theme? I mean I like that napo jelly jar cat as much as the next guy, but is it starting to feel a bit stale / overused? I feel like the site has made it pretty clear that chickens are most-people's favorite animal, and I may be a little biased but I think if YWS is going to continue to thrive in 2023 and beyond we need to follow what the people want. And the people want chickens. Maybe we could even do a play on "Poetry / Poultry" and make the site banner say "April is ... National Poultry Writing Month" or something like that.

I don't know? If I'm totally off base here, feel free to say so - I'm just really passionate about NaPo and I want it to be the best it can be. It's getting a little close to the wire, but is the theme still open for discussion? I don't want us to be making a huge mistake here.

Nate offered to add in another genre in the publishing center for NaPo (Nate, if you're reading this, you're the best). alliyah already peer pressured him into adding a "chickens" genre a while ago, so that's off the list. I was thinking maybe "uncontrollable angst" or "whimsical stream-of-consciousness" or just plain "water" could be strong candidates. Thoughts? Concerns?

Absolutely not fish. @Shady will take advantage of this and make it simply a fish genre, since fish are lame and can only be in water. And that would be awful.

One idea I wanted to throw out there just for feedback is what if users were charged extra points per capital letter in their poem?

Love. This. Def a viable first step to freeing the world from capitalism. The only amendment I would suggest is that we don't apply the capital letter tax on works that are written all in all-caps - I would really love to see some more screaming, key-smashing sort of poems on the site.

and I may be a little biased but I think if YWS is going to continue to thrive in 2023 and beyond we need to follow what the people want. And the people want chickens.

I absolutely appreciate the sentiments here. But do we have conclusive evidence that the people want chickens? Perhaps we should take a site-poll to really make sure we're making an informed choice regarding our NaPo theme.

@Snoink - good point. Perhaps an alternative to "water" is "midnight skies & other celestial things"?

Just popping in here to say thank you for mentioning my AI poetry competition! I've actually given it some more thought and I've enlisted the help of PoetryBot to help verify that the poems aren't AI-generated, on the condition that it can submit one entry for each person who participates. Looking forward to some machinery mimics showing off their skills!

About the new theme for NaPo: since we have two poetry mods with feather-related names (myself and @Quillfeather), I think it's only fitting that the new NaPo theme be somehow related to avian subjects, whether it be chickens or birds as a whole. (My vote's personally for turkeys; they're so underrated as birds.) The future is feathers, you all, and I think users will really dig the theme. I think you can go ahead and make the poll, Seirre, though—just to verify.

As for the new poetry genre in the publishing center: keysmash, definitely. Just, yknow, "aksjhsdjfkskdj."

Speaking of turkeys!!! This is slightly unrelated to Napo, but here are some wild turkeys in my front yard that I took this summer! (Also, I saw some turkey footprints in the snow a couple of days ago so they're totally around... just hiding...)

@Snoink that's a cute picture! That reminds me of Thanksgiving, what's everyone's plans for Thanksgiving?

Turkeys and Thanksgiving are really super great, don't get me wrong, but I'd love it if we could tryyyy to stay on-topic here. If some of us really cannot resist discussing Thanksgiving in great lengths, perhaps they can make a general chit-chat thread to that end :]

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I've gone ahead and made a thread to see What the people want! So I guess we'll just have to wait and see as the votes flood in.

I noted this publicly but I must voice my frustration about not having an option for all of the above! If I am apart of the people, I say we should have an option for all of the above because I do indeed want all of the above

@Omni I appreciate the input, but surely you can see how having ten themes for NaPo would pose a slight logistics issue.

It seems that this poll is making more people unhappy than not...

CATS.

Mesh gets it!!

It looks like cat café is taking a solid lead, with 13 votes so far. I'm not gonna say I told you so (though, let's be real, I did).

With that in mind, I think we should go ahead with changing our avvies to cat and coffee~ I'm going to try and conjure up a cute one for myself later today.

I see the "people" have spoken. I am still uncertain about how much AI voter fraud may be a factor in these official polls, but for now have changed my avvie accordingly. Looks like we have a very solid direction for April / NaPo!

Gearing up to be the best NaPo ever if we can stay united on the mod-front! :D

~~~

I did want to bring up another quick NaPo related item of discussion ... Roman Numerals.... not calling anyone out here, but I notice a few users are using them in their threads. Might it be time for a formal rule dis-allowing them?

example of roman numerals with the username obviously obscured for privacy and because again I'm not trying to call anyone out here:


reasons to dis-allow roman numerals:

1) they're confusing
2) I can't read them, so can never figure out whether to congratulate someone for writing 30 poems or 300 or something in-between.
3) it's really easy to get 1 mixed up with the pronoun "I" in roman numerals
4) I think they were more popular in the middle-ages, so might scare off younger user demographic (any Gen Z Zoomers care to weigh in; are roman numerals what the "cool kids" are using these days?)

Any thoughts?

As a Gen Z-er, I actually really like roman numerals. They're super poetry-core tbh and also a major slay. However, I get where you're coming from; maybe we could include a caveat that if roman numerals are used, their arabic numeral counterpart needs to be beside them? As someone who's used them in the past I don't think getting rid of them entirely is the best idea, but making them more accessible is definitely a worthy goal!

I've also added a tiny cat and coffee cup to my avvie. That's as much as I'll do.