2012
just around the corner
maura @ 10:15 am
It’s almost November,* which means that it’s almost NaBloPoMo — National Blog Posting Month, a bloggy spin on National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). A quick check of my archives reveals that I’ve NaBloPoMoed every year since 2006, wowza! Through my graduate library degree, Gus’s elementary school years, my job search, and my first few years at City Tech. 148 posts in all, because while I overachieved in 2006 with 31 posts, for some reason I only managed 27 posts in 2010.
* Why is it November? I’m sure I’ve whined about this in the past, but as Jonathan pointed out yesterday, October would be so much better as it doesn’t involve the speedup to the end of the year with holiday prep and possibly travel during the month, and prep for holidays and possibly travel in the following month, too. Which is why he concluded that Halloween is the best holiday ever.
I still think joining in with others to publicly declare you’re going to get some writing done and then doing it is a good goal. But this year I really, really, really need to focus with laser-like intensity on the book, because that sucker’s not going to write itself. Lucky for me the nerds got it covered: after mulling over it for a bit, I’m going to join up with AcWriMo this November. As you can probably guess from the name, this variant is a way to get specifically academic writing and work done by committing to a goal every day.
I’m not going to set a word count goal because there’s lots of stuff we need to get done that doesn’t involve writing: pulling quotes and images, wrangling citations (oh, Chicago Author-Notes Style, how I detest you!), and probably some reading (depending on the chapter). I’m still trying to fit in daily writing but sometimes all there’s time for is a couple of pages in my journal or a blog post here or elsewhere.
Here’s my goal: (at least) 2 hours of work on the book every day, including weekends. I’ve been striving to hit that goal all semester, and while it’s easy to do on some days (e.g., the 2 days/week I’m taking 2.5 hrs of RT in the morning), I haven’t been able to consistently make it, so I feel like it’s still enough of a stretch. Not sure how I’ll publicly record it — I’ll probably start by tweeting daily and see how that goes.
And if I can do it? I hope that sets me up to keep going at that pace after November ends (possibly with a holiday prep escape clause).
[…] right, it’s November, the month of writing. Like last year I’m planning to eschew NaBloPoMo in favor of the academic version: AcWriMo. I’ll try […]