Tuesday, October 29, 2013

NaNoWriMo and actually keeping a blog

So, if you are not familiar with the concept of NaNoWriMo, it stands for National Novel Writing Month. In the month of November, a bunch of people challenge themselves to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. I've attempted it twice and not gotten beyond 1000 words either time, but I know friends of mine have successfully written some novels, so it is possible. Although, my friends generally try to accomplish as many writing challenges in a month as possible so it's a little bit of cheating when they finish because their novels don't always make sense.

Anyways. OK so what does that have to do with actually keeping a blog? Well, I have a lot of friends who have started blogging and have, for one reason or another, given up on their blogs, but I've managed to keep a semi-consistent blog for a little more than six years (my first post was 6/16/08). I'm sure there are more than 50,000 words on this blog, since my average words per post is 350. Each week for The Retriever Weekly, I manage to knock out 500 word articles in about an hour or two (with a little bit of research). If I break the NaNoWriMo words into TRW sized bits, it's 100 articles. OK, so that's kind of a lot. It's approximately three articles per day. So about 3 hours of writing. Which is a little tough.

But, if you take those three hours of writing each day and convert it to a week, you get 21 hours. I watch a fair bit of shows on television, so let's add up the time I spend watching TV (and Youtube):
- Castle: 1 hour
- Elementary: 1 hour
- The Chew: daily, one hour each = 7 hours
- Dancing with the Stars: 2 hours
- Good Mythical Morning - 10 min daily = 1 hour
- Geek and Sundry Tabletop/CoOptitude, 30 min each = 1 hour
- Various other YouTube shows: 1 hour
- MasterChef Junior: 1 hour
- Chopped/Chopped After Hours: ~1 hour
- Glee: 1 hour
- The Amazing Race: 1 hour

Total: 18 hours

Then I also listen to Adventures in Odyssey, EarBiscuits, Sword and Laser podcasts each week, which makes up for those remaining three hours. Now, granted, I usually turn on my television shows while making dinner/running laundry/doing other mundane chores, OR I watch the shows as a social activity with friends of mine, so I couldn't really be writing on my blog while doing that, but my point is, I could find that time each week if I wanted.

Also, one of my new years resolutions was to blog once a week and to keep a personal journal daily. The idea behind those resolutions was to keep myself writing and to keep my relationship with God strong (because that's what I use my journal for). Neither one of those resolutions has held up (and you can check back on the blog in January for my yearly review/list of new resolutions for the rest of my resolutions), but I'm trying to make sure I at least get the intent of the resolutions, which was writing and processing my life.

Recently, I was told that I should "savor every moment" of my senior year because I might not ever see some of the people from college after graduation, and part of that is why I'm trying to process and record memories more.

All that to say - my plan for NaNoWriMo this year is to blog, every day, with the goal of getting to 50,000 words of personal reflection by the end of the month. Some posts I might decide to make private, and if that happens I'll post here letting you all know I wrote privately. If I don't, please call me out! :)

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