NaBloPoMo 2026: The Project

Do you know what month it is?! It's November! And with November comes NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month). San is our Fearless NaBloPoMo Leader and you should head over there to get the details. I'm definitely going to be posting every day in November. I've been planning this for MONTHS.

Whew. This has been a long time coming. Remember when I read Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti? She took ten years of her journal entries and put them in alphabetical order and then published them in a book? I was really struck by it. It was fascinating and the whole time I was just thinking about my Line A Day journal and how it was so much more mundane than hers. So...I did it. I took five years of my journal - forgive me for not doing ten - and typed every sentence into a spreadsheet (this took an untold amount of time), alphabetized it all, and edited it for clarity (seriously untold amounts of time and I still find typos every time I reread). The years are 2020-2024, so I'm calling it the Alphabetical COVID Diaries.

I also did a reread of Love Lettering earlier this year and it was still so good. In that book, Meg is a designer who mostly works on wedding invitations and planners. She's obsessed with hand drawn letters. I also read On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes which made me think about how I could look at my daily dog walks through a different lens. Then I came across this on a walk.

 

It's a capital A! It is! So...then I started looking for images to go with my Alphabetical COVID Diaries and if you've spent more than two hours with me since January, you know I've been looking for letters in nature and architecture. I didn't want letters that were designed as letters, you know? I'm not like Meg and I didn't want hand drawn letters, but just accidental letters out there in the world. Because I was always looking for letters, so were the people who spend time with me. Co-workers came in and said "there are Ks on the gate at the Catholic church" or "the entire front of Tutt is covered in Zs." One of my colleagues and I were about to do a huge presentation and she called me over and told me to look at the ceiling that was littered with Hs. 

It has been essentially a year long project and I'll tell you right now that my husband is super sick of it and he's going to be so excited when I hit publish on the last of this. But I think I'll still be looking for letters. 

So that's my project. For NaBloPoMo this year, I'm going to publish my Alphabetical COVID Diaries with roughly a letter a day. Some letters will take two days, but it will all wash out in the end. For those posts, I will always include a photo of the letter that I have found this year. I am also going to CLOSE COMMENTS on the posts because most of them will be boring and mundane (Laundry. Laundry. Laundry. Then I went to the grocery store.) and I don't want to add work to NaBloPoMo participants. I'll still have some other content - think book reviews, Five by Friday posts - and those I'll have comments on - but I honestly think it's best if no one tries to make sense or ask questions of the nonsense that's going to come out of this project.

I'm quite excited and I hope everyone will, at the very least, skim these posts so you can learn just how often I am upset about Mondays existing in the world. 

Just to add a bit of suspense to this, I will not even be posting my first Alphabetical COVID Diaries until Thursday because I'm posting my final CBBC post and my regular beginning of the month posts on Tuesday and Wednesday. However, I wanted everyone to know my plan. 

Also, go check out San's list of NaBloPoMo participants and find a new blogger to cheer on this month. 

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Who's excited for this nonsense? Who truly thinks this is nonsense? Who's writing every month in November? Who's cheering on other NaBloPoMo participants?