All of the NaNos and NaBlos and PoMos.

I’m limping into the final week of NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month), and it’s been an experience. This time last year, I was dragging my way into the last few days of my second year of NaNoWriMo.

Trying to blog every day is actually much harder for me than writing a novel every day for a month. Why? Because here, I’m writing for an audience, and I feel as though I need to make sure what I put out there is interesting or inspiring for people. Do you have a responsibility as a blogger to constantly put out A-star blog posts? No, you don’t – after all, some ideas and words take time to incubate and express themselves clearly.

For me, blogging is often an intuitive, organic thing, that I like to do naturally, rather than forcing myself to write a blog post every day. It’s been interesting because it’s demonstrated to me that even though I love blogging, and this month has rekindled that passion, I sometimes need to give myself a break and understand that blogging every day isn’t sustainable – or at least big, thoughtful and interesting blog posts don’t happen for me every day. I have to break it up with quotes and photos. Which is fine – visual ideas and memories are just as interesting to me as blog posts that communicate something with words.

I have a few blog posts from the two years I did NaNoWriMo – they might be interesting to those of you doing it this year. If anything, they might give you that boost to keep going. I remember only too well how hard the last week is…

Let Your Imagination Rain

Day 5: Keep Going

NaNoWriMo 2011

Second Time Around

A Manifesto

Progress

Supernatural (less of a NaNo post, more to do with genre)

Hope you enjoy them. I found the first year much more exciting than the second year I did it, perhaps because the first time you do anything is always more enthusing. What helped was knowing that I could do it, that I had done it before and sailed through with 50,000 words. There were a lot of obstacles – so much of the time you are fighting against yourself and whether you think you can do it. Unfortunately, I think a lot of writers have to fight against themselves or their ‘inner critic’, ‘inner editor’, or the ‘procrastination monkeys’ (!). But it can be done, and you learn a lot about writing a horrible, messy first draft with everything in it. The editing comes later, but with stories and novels, it’s important to have something to work with – and you have to get it down as soon as possible.

I’m also astounded by the amount of comments, likes and follows I’ve had for my Identity post, which was Freshly Pressed last week. There have been some lovely, thought-provoking comments and although I can’t reply to all of them, I would just like to say thank you – and I hope you enjoy reading my blog. It makes me very thankful and honoured to have people come and read my stuff and gain something from what I write.