no photos, no NaBloPoMo

Well, I tried posting some pictures of the kids from yesterday's morning of Homeschooling Classes at the local children's museum, but Blogger seems to be uncooperative this morning (although the note says they are working on the problem). So instead I thought I'd answer a question I've gotten from a couple of different folks.

Several folks have asked if I'm going to participate in the NaBloPoMo this year. For those of you unfamiliar with that term, it means National Blog Posting Month, which is held in November each year as a companion/alternative to the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, where participants write a 50,000 word novel from scratch during the month of November). I did participate in NaBloPoMo, on my other blog, last year. At the time I figure I was posting pretty much daily anyway, so why not. So folks that used to read over there and have followed me here have been wondering if I will participate again, this time on THIS blog, since this is where I'm blogging now.

But my attitude this year is the just the opposite from last year -- I'm pretty much posting every day, so why bother.

Why the difference? I'm not sure. I think I participated last year because I wanted to see if I could do it -- could make the commitment to sitting down every day and typing (I guess you could call it "writing", although spitting up daily comments from my life doesn't feel like much of a creative process to me). I wanted to see if I could do it, because there's a part of me that very much would like to do the NaNoWriMo, although I've never written a novel. Fiction, what's that? A work of fiction to me! (Of course, that's probably the attraction to me -- I've never done it, so I feel like I should!) So the first step in my mind was to see if I could actually manage to find something to write about every day for a month on my blog. And you know what? I did it! Were it my "best work"? Nope. But these things are not about laying down your best work or showcasing your writing ability, they are about making a commitment and DOING it.

And in typical fashion for me, I did it, so I'm ready to move on.

Am I ready to move on to signing up for NaNoWriMo? Maybe. But probably not this year. The first bit of difficulty would lie in the fact that I'm taking the kids on a trip to visit a friend for the first week of November, and I don't own a laptop. Yeah, I know, they still make pencil and paper. Problem with that is that I would then need to type what I wrote into my word processor (another commitment to time!) when I got home. And, um, well, I can't really read my own handwriting. Of course, I could just NOT write while on my trip (and honestly, that time might be better spend thinking about what I'm going to write!), but that would mean just three weeks to write 50,000 words instead of four. And one of those weeks is Thanksgiving, which is "my" holiday (as in, everyone come here and I, the person who doesn't really cook, cooks the biggest meal of the year, so needless to say, it takes a lot of preparation, physically and mentally). And meanwhile, I've got critters to care for and children to educate.

So no, probably not this year.

But there's still time to change my mind.