It’s National Novel Writing Month and writers will take pen and paper, keyboard, voice to text, and other forms to attempt to get that novel draft into it’s first fixed format. In years past I’ve seen Sweater Challenges (NaNoSweMo), Short Story Challenges, Podcast and Cooking Challenges — and blogging challenges.
Daily blogging was something I’ve occasionally attempted on my knitting blog and these days I keep on waiting on various forms of inspiration to write. A million emails, rewriting library policy documents and drafting federal responses, these are all various forms that likely equate to the better part of 1600 words per day needed to get to the 50K words written in a month; but focused they are not.
And I do miss blogging. It’s a format that while I write with my various audiences in mind, does still serve partially as my own aide memoir. What mattered at that point? When did I knit those socks? Do I have any recollection of starting that project? I’m not the most adept user of the Twitter thread, though occasionally I put together a Day in the Life and I think if I tried to commit to 30 days here exclusively, we’d all run out of steam in about a week.
So I’m back here, and on HedgehogKnitting, and on UseUpYear — a project that nagged me into starting it at the end of 2020 and continues to wander around bothering me. Over the next month I want to write again in each of those places. For me, writing works best when I’m actually doing it on a regular basis. The writing muscles and ideas start to coordinate again and there are *more* things to write about, rather than fewer.
There will be some project updates of all kinds, at least one look into my bathroom cabinetry, and the story of Boswick the kitten as that clearly needs to be written down before the Philosopher and I both forget it entirely. I’d like to aim for 350-500 words for my posts, something that goes beyond what I would put in a decent sized thread but also not trying to make me or anyone else wade through a five page essay. Unless a topic goes really well..
If there’s a topic you’ve been hoping I’ll write about on any of the three blogs, do drop a line, a tweet, a podcast episode and I’ll see what I can do.