isoglossia — pending reconstruction

Here you’ll find what is surely the most original idea for a post on this, the last day of November.

Especially alert readers will have noticed that there’s been a new post here every damn day this month. This is because I accidentally signed up for an activity called “NaBloPoMo” or something similar. I am still not entirely clear on why I did this or how it came to be, but lacking definite answers to the lingering questions on that score, I’ll blame Laid-Off Dad, whose site I began reading around the same time I found that I’d committed myself to posting every day throughout the month of November (so that acronym up there probably means something like “National Blog Posting Month”, in case you’re not really paying attention, like I wasn’t).

The month in review: what have we learned?
• Lots and lots of crumpled up little Post-It^™ Notes are the sine qua non of daily posting
• Actually pulling out a calendar and seeing how many days there are to fill with your half- quarter-baked vaporings is not a bad idea
• November is a great time to sneak in some drafts you wrote two years ago that somehow never made it
• ‘Post’ is actually a much more generic and flexible concept than was previously thought
• Random Picture Stream and Conversations are under-utilized categories during the period of December-October
• Sleep is overrated
• It appears that knitting is quickly replacing pr0n as the raison d’etre of the internet
• Sweet fancy Moses, there are a lot of cats out there

Actually, it wasn’t nearly as difficult as I thought it would be when November 1st dawned. By the end of the first week I had a pretty decent editorial calendar roughed out, and within a few days many posts were in the pipeline, which is to say already pre-quarter-baked. If time permitted I baked them a little more. If not, not. I didn’t really need to do anything differently this month, except to be slightly less lazy, marginally more organized, and significantly less obsessed with proofreading. If the photos, conversations, posting-to-the-future, and other tactics I used to get through NaBloPoMo were cheating, then I’m cheating all the time and you by extension are soiling yourself, ethically speaking, by even reading this.

The official rules of this activity (which is a new adjunct to the eight-year-old NaNoWriMo) don’t say what does or does not constitute ‘cheating’, and they couldn’t be much simpler: post every day. I added my own rule to this: don’t post every day about the fact that you are posting every day. The organizer put up a randomizer to direct you (at random) to the billions and billions of participating sites, and I quickly found a strong negative correlation between overt mention of NaBloPoMo and the likelihood that I would enjoy the content of the place where I found myself randomly deposited. So I made my own rule: save all this meta-talk about how OMG I’m like totally posting everyday! for the end of the month.

Another rule: do it without pimping out my child overmuch.

Some interesting sites I discovered through the randomizer or branches bifurcating from it:
• Banjeroo
• In the Gutter
• Notes to self
• the kilowatthour
• Citizen of the Month
• The Babbling Brooke
• One Child Left Behind

I also found a lot of stuff out there, not necessarily cat- or yarn-related, that I did not want to read, no matter how large I tried to make my heart. Maybe someday when I am feeling especially misanthropic I will post a list of things that will cause me to click on through before your site has even finished loading.

Overall I enjoyed having some pressure brought to bear, some RIGOR, as a colleague would say, and I think it was probably good for breaking out of a rut — note that November’s post total is greater than the previous three months’ combined. I spent a good deal less time over-editing this month, and enjoyed having a bit more spontaneity injected into the process of posting. The pressure decreased as the month went on, and by the middle of the term of commitment I had more than enough posts or ideas in progress to make it through without whining or panicking. During this month, though, my regular reading habit suffered tremendously.

It occurs to me that this event, assuming it’s to be repeated, should be renamed to reflect its international scope. (For some reason most of the good blogs I stumbled upon in the last 30 days turned out to be, well, Canadian). I realize that InternaBloPoMo doesn’t have quite the same ring, but what about GloBloPoMo?

Don’t be surprised if the pace around here slackens somewhat in December.