What are NaNoWriMo and NaBloPoMo?

12 Nov 2023 · 📖 in 2 minutes Writing challenges for fun and profit

If you haven't heard yet, November is busy month for writers all over the world. Throughout this month runs two excellent challenges with NaNoWriMo, which looks to see particiapants write 50,000 words of a novel, and the prehaps slightly more achievable NaBloPoMo which has participants writing a blog post every month.

Why tho?

Writing, like everything, requires many hours of practice to be good at it. I don't really have a sense of myself as a writer and fear that my university training in technical writing influences far too much of the content I produce. That said i'm not going to improve as a writer if I don't invest in it and NaNoWriMo felt to me like a great way to do this.

I followed #NaNoWriMo on mastodon and saw that there were many folks getting onboard, in fact they were getting really on board, with 3 months to go util November I saw story outlines, character descriptions, writing classes and much, much more. I immediately felt super intimidated by this and while I do want to write a novel, maybe I should start with a short story.

Roll on November and it's not looking good. My short story is barely an idea and I wasn't realistic about the amount of time I would have to put into this.

So I've decided to change up.

Changing lanes

This morning I was looking over the #NaNoWriMo posts and saw a similar but different hashtag, #NaBloPoMo. All of a sudden I was extremely motivated to write a blog.

Ok, so I won't write a novel this month and I probably won't write daily but I will write. You might accuse me of taking an easy out and that's probably not unfair to say, yet even a dedicated month of writing in November would be more than I've ever written, so.. baby steps.

(This is also a bit of a gimmie to allow me some time to prep tomorrows post given I'll be working)

First appeared on Trusty Interior, last update 14 Jul 2024