That's All You Have To Do

Yesterday I stopped by Boegle Blog Bloggery and learned that National Blog Posting Month is in November. It is sponsored by the folks at National Novel Writing Month, or by friends of theirs. The whole thing of NaBloPoMo is that you have to post every single day of the month. I've posted 284 times in the 295 days since Christmas Eve last year (and some of those posts covered several days in one post), so I think I can accomplish that.


The only thing I don't like about signing up for NaBloPoMo is that I had to join some social networking thing called Ning to join. It's bad enough that I'm on Tribe; I refuse to explore Ning at all and have the barest of "profiles."


NaNoWriMo, you may recall, is about writing a 50,000-word novel during the month of November. I tried doing this last year, after encouragement from Tea and Shobi-wan. I started twice and got to like 7,000 words on one of them. You have to write around 1670 words a day to write a novel in 30 days. I stopped; I had to give myself permission to quit.


Last summer and fall I was really depressed. Shobi-wan said that she saw it, and tried to encourage me with "If you need anything, call me any time"-type offers, but I didn't think anyone knew what bad shape I was in, because I didn't even know. A lot of the free-floating anxiety I experience from time to time appeared then, and the flying thing got really bad last summer. I went to the gym every day just to get out of the house and to have done something. That's why I say that staring to volunteer at the food bank saved my life, because working there gave shape to my days and connected me with people who didn't want anything from me and were easy to be around.


I set myself this goal to write every day and instead of making me feel better, it made me feel worse. Every day I didn't write 1700 words, or any words at all, was another day I felt like I failed. Having "the novel" waiting for me every day was like having a self-esteem-sucking monster sitting on my desk, chanting, "You can't write and you never could! Nah-nah!" I didn't see that at first, but as soon as I realized that this monster was sitting on my desk, I pulled out of NaNoWriMo. I already felt like I had failed at what I thought was going to be the job of my dreams, and NaNoWriMo felt like more coals on my head.


I'm not going to sign up for NaNoWriMo this year, but NaBloPoMo? Totally doable.


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