You Go, Girl

My dear sister-in-law has entered NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month)! She has committed herself to write a post a day for the entire month of November. I'm quite happy she has decided to do this, because she's a pretty good writer, and I like reading her stuff, and she often keeps us waiting a while between posts, and I need my fixes or I start writing really long and convoluted run-on-sentences.

And she paid me a compliment! She said that I write really long posts. And I do it a lot!

Well, I think it's a compliment, at any rate.

However, after some consideration, I decided not to participate in NaBloPoMo this year. After all, the whole point of NaBloPoMo is to get people to blog more, and there are certain people out there who apparently think that I need to blog less. After all, I did manage to write 31 posts in October, 33 in September, and 18 posts in August (with my blog being created only 15 days before the end of the month), so I'm already averaging slightly more than one post a day. And one of the rules of NaBloPoMo is that you have to post every day. Sometimes the muse deserts me for a day, and sometimes she comes in and just starts whacking me around. So I don't particularly want to subject myself to that rule.

But I'm very flattered by her comment that I "should be an author by now," in reference to NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month challenge. The idea here is that entrants have to write 50,000 words for a new novel by the end of the month. Sounds doable and all, except that I haven't written fiction since highschool (although it would appear there are those who think my homeschooling posts qualify). Hmmm... I'd need to come up with a story idea. Hmm... let's see... no, that would... er...

See, the problem is that very often when I start writing, it goes off somewhere I never intended it to. I occasionally start writing things that are funny or amusing, which by the time I'm done, I and everyone who read it are thoroughly depressed. (I suspect this happened to Shakespeare a lot, like with Romeo and Juliet). And other times it starts out philosophical, and winds up preachy; or it starts out serious and winds up absurd. I think back to my attempts at fiction in high school, and when I think of them, I cringe and thank the Lord that I never actually managed to get anyone else to read them (in one case, because the computer died during a disk write operation, and the story got blasted from the disk. In that case, I can truly declare divine providence was at work, and to this day I am in awe of the magnificent power and love of our beneficient Savior, who delivered me from turning the thing in and making a complete fool of myself).

So I find the idea intriguing. But I suspect if I started it, my wife would be sorely tempted to start building that Mechanical Toe thing I mentioned in my last post and find yet another practical use for it....