The impending arrival of November also marks the arrival of National Novel Writing Month - or “NaNoWriMo”, to it’s thousands of participants.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, you’ll know that NaNoWriMo is an annual attempt by the deranged to pen a 50,000 word book in one calendar month. By contrast NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) is a far easier proposition; writing at least one blog post per day for each day of November.
The idea of NaNoWriMo is seductive - emphasising quantity over quality, you should end the month having written a novel. You might never attempt to publish the novel - indeed, you may never let anybody ever read it - but you will be able to inject it’s existence into polite conversation at dinner parties… “oh, I wrote a novel once”.
Fifty thousand words is a LOT of words though. Without checking, it works out at about 1600 a day. There’s only so much crap you can write before you have to start thinking about story, plot, characters, and so on. I guess it might be possible to write a complete work of jibberish, but still…
How about “Furious Frank and the Evil Underpants”, or “The Exploding Custard Powered Kitten” ?
So, if you’re not going to attempt to write a novel, how about 30 days worth of navel gazeage ? Thirty self obsessed days of self congratulatory or self inflammatory hogswill to warm the walls of your blog…
It strikes me that one of these challenges is noble. It’s a mountain to climb - a task attainable only by those with gumption, spirit, or an awful lot of spare time on their hands, and no internet connection to distract them. The other challenge is relatively easy for the self interested masses that routinely share the uninteresting with the world.
I wonder if this blog post has been offensive enough to fellow bloggers yet?
So - I have no idea if I will be at thestart ofNaNoWriMo this year, so I’m sitting on my hands for the moment - making no promises. Knowing my workload, my typical mayhem filled day, and various other obligations, I would be rather idiotic to push myself forward once more.
There is of course one problem - I am an idiot.
Could you write a couple of thousand words a day for a month?