I’ve decided to participate in NaBloPoMo, or National Blog Posting Month, the blogosphere’s answer to NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. As you can see from the official Seal of Yoda, this means I will post every day. I think I just had a very small panic attack as I wrote that last sentence. Post every day. Ack! Well, challenges aren’t supposed to be easy. A slight sense of dread is natural (gulp).
But I think the experience will be fun, and maybe I’ll get more comfortable with frequent posting. Frequent posting means setting aside a chunk of time on a frequent basis to actually write something coherent and interesting, in the case of this blog, generally about food. It also means doing food-related things like cooking and shopping at the farmer’s market so as to have the means to actually write about said food-related things. Once the food related activities are complete, said activities have been contemplated, and a post has been written, it’s time for editing, rewriting, re-editing, re-writing, proofing, and finally, posting. I haven’t even gone into the part where I take twenty photos with my horrid little digital camera from hell, none of which come out remotely the way I want. Then I edit the photos and cringe when I finally see them hanging there, looking like forlorn little children wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters.
In some ways, frequent posting, and indeed, blogging itself goes against the way I’ve always written anything. I like to write, revise, write some more, revise, tweak, and write some more until I get more or less what I’m after. This is pretty much the antithesis of blogging, a spontaneous, idiomatic medium often replete with typos (ack!) and clichés (no!). But that’s the beauty of blogging as well, saying what you mean in the moment, in the simplest way, spellcheck be damned.
I think my goals for this month’s little experiment include finding some sort of happy medium between the way I like to write, and the way I’m sometimes afraid to write. I will try to find the middle ground between controlled, endless self-editing and spontaneous typo-laden stream-of-consciousness. And if it isn’t perfect, it isn’t perfect. At least it’s there for you to read, or not.
Another goal is to play around with my camera more. True, I do hate the little ogre. But some smart dude once said that good photos are taken by a good photographer, or something like that. A bad camera has its limitations, but if I keep working at it, I might get some good food photos out of it. I might also post photos of the back yard, if the pasta looks too glossy.
So do stay tuned for more spontaneous writing, photos, and possibly some unrelated notes and thoughts. As I will be posting on a daily basis, just about any topic is fair game. Oh, and please feel free to ask questions or request topics for posting. I’ll do my best to oblige.
Folks, thank you for reading!
P.S. Big tip o’ the hat to Jen from Life Begins at Thirty for posting about NaBloPoMo.
