Reflection and resolution

Hey friends! I just blogged for 31 days in a row! And holy crap is my brain a pile of mush.

Today is that last day of my mission to blog every day in the month of November. I'm half elated and have relived. I won't lie, it's been grueling from time to time, but also quite exhilarating!

It became abundantly clear that I have no shortage of ideas. I don't think I had a "winner" every day but I was shocked at how easy it was to find a new thing to focus on everyday. Of the five drafted posts I'd accumulated as a cushion before started this project I only had to use two. And that is even with getting pretty sick for a couple days.

Because I had a daily practice I felt more and more confident about telling people "I'm a writer". I loved having a concrete project to talk about.

I loved having the daily rigor of an hours-long writing obligation. But it did get in the way of making plans and all too often had the side effect of being a great excuse to not leave the house. Most significantly my plans to apply to grad school took a significant hit. I hope to get back to them this December. So I can be absolutely done, send them out, and then never think about them again.

Also I like the outdoors and miss it (see yesterday's post!).

So I'm gonna try an experiment wherein I continue doing some of the best parts of this challenge, but in a way that still leaves room for having a life and getting sick.

I've come to a soft resolution about my daily writing practice which will hopefully help me maintain some rigor but still give me a break now an then.

I newly resolve to write at least 1,500 words every weekday (2x my usual), 750 words (morning pages) on the Saturdays and Sundays, and I will blog at least three times during each 7 day period.

Hope this works!

My NaNoWriMo Project (NaBloWriMo)

So here's the thing.

I participated in National Novel Writing Month exactly once (Nov. 2011). The novel I wrote then remains unedited and unread. It was fun and viciously challenging. I'm glad I did it. However I far from primarily consider myself a novelist. My writing priorities actually go something like this,
poetry
essays/blogposts
prose poems
short stories
novels.

So while I won't say I'm not a novelist I will say that writing a novel is not high on my list of priorities right now. In light of this preference and my fierce passion to get better at nonfiction, this year I've elected to hold myself to the daily 1,666 word count demand of NaNoWriMo (50,000 words in a month). Free from the expectation of a novel I'll encouraging myself to daily draft both a personal essay/otherwise creative nonfic piece and a poem.

In addition to writing the directed 1,500+ words I'm resolving to blog every day this November. As someone who generally posts about twice a month obviously this terrifies me. Writing 1,500+ words can take at the very least 40 minutes (and I'm anticipating the switching genres will only take longer) and editing a drafted blogpost usually takes 1.5-2 hours. This is a huge undertaking. And it is bound to have some kinks.

In the past two years I've tried to hold to content of this blog to some standard of coherence and relevance/usefulness the communities I care about. I will still attempt to meet this standard, but I can't promise that the quality of my upcoming daily posts will not be somewhat erratic. Bear with me friends, it's gonna be a long month. And please please please comment on upcoming posts, especially if something you read sounds interesting yet unfinished. I plan to make updated/expanded/edited post on the things I'll likely only be able to skim by doing daily posts.

Thanks!

<3 WRM