Hi all.
So November seems to be a pretty ambitious month for a lot of people. It probably has something to do with everyone panicking in some weird way about the end of the year. I mean, No Shave November? All that means is I see way too many patchy beards and dirty 'staches, and I already see enough hipster facial hair out in Bucktown.
Seen on a daily basis at any given moment west of Damen.
Actually, I can totally imagine all guys my age waking up and looking in the mirror near the end of October and thinking, Oh God, it's almost December!? I have to see how molest-y my mustache actually looks! I mean, girls basically do No Shave November like, all winter. Shorts season is about two seconds in Chicago, and besides, no one's seeing these legs but me. Basically I will have fur by the time April rolls around, you can bet on it.
Oh, and Election Day is this month--I've done an absentee ballot again this year, and wept silently on the inside as usual for a good few of the Texas candidates. I mean, we have this guy, for crying out loud.
It's so dumb, I can't even get into it and I especially can't properly segue into my next, and final point. November is a big one for a lot of writers as it is NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month.
The goal is in the name--in one month, people try (and often succeed--a bestseller born of NaNoWriMo was Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen) to write an entire novel, submititng a certain word count every day of November. The finished product is 50K words minimum, or the typical length of a standard novel. There are a lot of variations on it, with various methods of accountability and reward, but if anything it's more of a community of writers' support.
I've considered doing it before, but opted out this year because I'm basically doing NaNoWriMo next semester, when the only class I'll be taking is my program's Novel Writing seminar. It's the first of its kind and structured after NaNoWriMo (our professor even referenced it in the syllabus), and when the class went up for registration it was like the newest version of crack and my peers and I were all major junkies. I think we're just a bunch of masochists.
I'll be submitting 20 pages a week for 10 weeks and I'm not sure yet what I'm going to be writing an entire novel about quite yet--I mean, I do know, but I haven't decided yet--so there's no way I'll be doing NaNoWriMo this year. Writing one novel in 10 weeks is crazy, but two within a three month span? Count me out--to say the least! However, I am doing a spinoff started by BlogHer--NaBloPoMo.
NaBloPoMo is even simpler. National Blog Post Month means posting on your blog every single day of November, which I think will be a fun challenge as I tend to be pretty lax on here. The issue isn't anything uncommon--I have a lot of ideas, I take a long time to write anything, I am really busy, and so on. But I'm challenging myself and holding myself accountable, so if you are interested, stick along with me!
They do allow for some cheats, such as posting only photos, or tags, or blogg-y things like that. But I'm going to try and put out thoughtful, well-written content to the best of my ability. Hooray!
If anyone else out there is doing this, or thinks it would be fun, let me know! See you on day 2.
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