NaBloPoMo reflections

I did it!

I put up (at least) one blog post a day for a whole month. The time seemed to fly. I have no idea where November went. I sailed right over the 100 posts mark without even noticing. Wow.

Looking back on it for a moment, I'm really happy with how it turned out. Some of my posts worked better than others, obviously, but on the whole I think I managed to put up moderately decent material every day without stretching too much. That's not to say that it was always easy --- it was a real struggle to find time to post on some days --- but I really enjoyed the challenge.

Partially that's because of the training that I got working on my college newspaper, a daily. When you have to put out a paper every single day, there's no time to procrastinate, and no room for excuses. Those years trained me to be able to just put something, anything, down on paper and work with it from there, without being too judgmental about it to start with. That's a skill that's served me well in all aspects of my life, not just here, although there were some days over this past month that I could feel that training kick in big-time.

But mostly I enjoyed doing this because I really like writing (unlike most people, I am led to understand). I always have. But I haven't been able to write just for me lately because I do so much writing as part of my job. When I have a bit of a break, then, I'd rather do something different. At least that's what I thought. But writing this blog has made me realize that it's not necessarily the writing itself that I'm tired of at the end of a long day, just the academic and work-related stuff. It's been nice to have a more personal, less stressful writing project to look forward to every day.

The question now is, will I keep it up? November is officially the month for NaBloPoMo, but the challenge continues every month (see the website for details). My thought right now is, sure! Why not? I'm feeling really energized by the fullness of what I was able to accomplish in November, and I'm excited to see how long I can sustain it. It's also nice to be able to challenge myself in that way while having the opportunity to give myself a break if I need it. Now I know that I can do a post a day for a month, so if I miss a day here and there from here on out, I won't sweat it.

The other question is, what else will I do? In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I took on NaBloPoMo because I was a little scared of jumping fully into its big sibling, NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, also November). I kinda wanted to have that challenge, to write a full work of fiction a little bit every day for a month, but I also suspected that I wouldn't be able to go straight from writing purely for my job to actually crafting a work of fiction. So NaBloPoMo presented a nice in-between step, and has gotten me geared up to try the "real thing" next year.

In the meantime, keep checking this space for new stuff!

Many thanks to Michael for his support over the past month and always, and also to Diana (who blogs at dianasaur dot net) for introducing me to the NaBloPoMo concept.