It’s November, and I’ve decided to set myself two tasks. The first is to take part in Movember, partly to raise money for prostate cancer research but mainly because I reckon I can kick my colleagues’ fellow moustache growing attempts thanks to my swarthy Mediterranean genes.
But the other thing I’m planning to do is National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo). Or should that be International Blog Posting Month (InNaBloPoMo)? For that matter, I’m not clear if this is even a thing; the only reference to it I can find is the BlogHer portal in the US and they haven’t updated their Twitter feed for a year.
No matter. I’ve seen people doing this in the past and my colleagues Emily and John are planning to do the same – so this can be our thing.
I briefly flirted with the idea of doing NaNoWriMo before realising I was doomed to failure. I may have a novel in me, but extracting it isn’t going to happen right now (I’m also a little ambivalent about the whole concept – surely we should be encouraging aspiring writers to perfect the art of the short story first before getting them to inflict their doorstop sized magnum opi on us? Discuss).
In lieu of there being any clearly established set of NaBloPoMo rules as far as I can tell, I’m going to set myself a few. Unlike those brave NaNoWriMo souls, I’m not planning to bash out 1,700 words on this blog every day (although I’ve been known to write far more in a single posting). My only rules are that each posting must be an article and not simply a couple of sentences, and that I do a piece every day (if I skip a day for any reason, I’ll have to catch up – which could get challenging if I leave it for more than a day). I’m going to aim for articles to be around 300-500 words, with the occasional longer piece.
In the not so distant past, doing this would not have seemed like much of a challenge – I’ve certainly had periods where I wrote far more than that. Right now, it seems quite a task: I didn’t even manage to finish my A-Z of Dredd in the summer (although I plan to use this as a chance to rectify that) – it’s very true that writing is like a muscle; the more you exercise it the easier it becomes. Any suggestions about what to write on would be greatly appreciated.
In the meantime, please contribute to my Movember‘s efforts. Thank you!