13.31 A (Half) Year of Activity - DONE!!

I just finished a yearly project. Each day of the month I posted on a pre-determined theme. During the month of November, I'll post a collage of all my photos on the daily theme from the past year. The theme for the thirty-first day of the month was "Activity."

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2022 Reading Stats - I would be broke if it weren't for the beauty of public libraries. 
Baking - I mostly successfully made lemon bars.
Writing Daily - Ha ha ha. I am so excited that this little experiment is coming to a close. 
A Little of This, A Little of That - This is when I first did a straw poll to see if anyone wanted to do a reread of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn with me. The very early stages of the Cool Bloggers Book Club!
Sunday Chore Day - I legitimately walked you through the chores I did. I'm SO SORRY. I had to write something every day. 
Scribe It - Interesting idea, but it didn't work for my needs. 
NaBloPoMo 2023 - We did it!

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Book count: 2

Sign count: 1

Food count: 1

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Draped Reclining Figure by Henry Moore (bronze, 1952-1953, cast 1956)

This is a very celebratory post for me. Not only have we all survived NaBloPoMo, but my half-baked project to blog every day for a year is finally over. You can heave a sigh of relief that I will never again be posting multiple times a day! Woot woot! (I am lying. I did this exact same thing in 2014-2015, so maybe in another decade I'll do it again.)

Here are some lessons I've learned over the course of this project.

1) I can write something every day. It doesn't have to be witty or even particularly GOOD, but it's possible to write something every day. The beauty of posting every day is that if you write something mediocre, it's replaced by something newer the next day. The opposite of that is also true, though; sometimes you write something that is smart and gets lots of engagement and it is also replaced the next day. 

2) The hardest part, for me, is not the writing. It's coming up with the ideas about what to say. Sure, I might notice that there are a lot of PopTarts or that the sidewalks are messed up, but what do I say about them?  Where are all these ideas supposed to come from, anyway? 

3) Some themes were more helpful than others. For example, the theme "Moment" was so flexible that using it as a prompt was pretty easy. But the theme "Failure" felt limiting and negative.  Perhaps I should have considered the reusability of the prompts more at the beginning of the project, but I did not, so sometimes I had to get creative.

4) As I've talked about before, these prompts did start to overtake my life a little bit. If anyone so much as said the word "safety" or "decision" or "contact" in my vicinity, my ears would perk up and I would be much more interested than I really should have been. 

5) It is true, isn't it, that a big project is just a series of little projects? When I published my first hat post, it all seemed very daunting. But each post on its own wasn't that time consuming, although I hesitate to even think about the total number of hours I spent on it.

6) This came at a great time in my life. For most of the length of the project, I was either unemployed or underemployed and I was feeling adrift. This did give me structure to my life AND a community of people who supported me even when I wrote about very mundane things like my linen closet, how I do laundry, what's in my curio cabinet, or how I track goals. My readers have given me good advice, made fantastic recommendations, and just generally connected me to the human race.

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Don't worry. I have a book review coming out tomorrow.

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Congrats to all the people who completed NaBloPoMo! Thanks to everyone who commented regularly! Thanks to San for organizing all of it like the badass she is.

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What are you blogging plans for December? Anyone up for a 31/31 days of posting?  (No, not me.)

9.24 Family - In the Mail

Bestest Friend and I are doing a blog project. Every day we will write a blog post on a pre-determined topic chosen by a random noun generator. The theme for the twenty-fourth day of the month is "Family."

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Dr. BB and I spent a day in Chicago a couple of weekends ago. He needed to pick up an instrument he was having some work done at a specialty shop there and I went to check off my "leave the five-block radius of your house for something other than the grocery store" goal.  While we were there, we went to a fancy stationery shop that sells fancy pens that sell for thousands of dollars. As one does when you find yourself in that sort of neighborhood.

My husband bought fancy paper and some ink for his fancy pens* and does anyone want to know what I bought?

Postcards! Of course. I sent them to my mom, sister, uncle, and a couple of college friends. I also sent some of my infamous women in art postcards to a couple of people I'd been thinking about. 

*My husband loves writing utensils, especially fountain pens. Like, he really loves them. One of the most valuable items that we have in our entire house is a fountain pen he splurged on early in grad school. Turns out that this pen is a limited edition of some sort and now is conservatively worth more than ten times what he paid for it. *shrug* It's his daily pen, though, so I guess we're not selling it for that sweet money.

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When's the last time you got a postcard in the mail?

9.7 Contact - Higher Than

Bestest Friend and I are doing a blog project. Each day we will write a blog post on a pre-determined theme chosen by a random noun generator. The theme for the seventh day of the month is "Contact." 

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This is my last nagging reminder to you, dear Reader, that our A Tree Grows in Brooklyn book club will begin on MONDAY! It's here. This is NOT a drill.  It's only about fifty pages a week. Please join us!

July 10 (Chapters 1 - 5)
July 17 (Chapters 6 -10)
July 24 (Chapters 11 - 18)
July 31 (Chapters 19 - 26)
August 7 (Chapters 27 - 32)
August 14 (Chapters 33 - 37)
August 21 (Chapters 38 – 41)
August 28 (Chapters 42 – 45)
September 4 (Chapters 46 – 51)
September 11 (Chapters 52 – 56)
September 18 (entire book wrap up)

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I have written about a yoga class called 20/20/20 that the yoga teacher at the community center teaches that I occasionally take. In my first mention, I suggested that perhaps I wanted more guidance in the class. In my second mention, I complained that I was uncomfortable with the journaling aspect of the class. In my most recent post about it, I did more complaining about the journaling. Well, friends, I'm here to say that I have done a complete 180 on this class. 

I love it.

At one point, Jenny wrote a comment here that I could just use the journaling time to write about whatever I wanted to. There's no need for me to write about my empowered vision of the future or what color I feel if that doesn't work for me. I sort of laughed because I am a rule follower, someone who wants do the homework right, and do what authority figures tell me to do because they must have their reasons for their rules.  But. Jenny was right.  My yoga teacher just wants me to do what works for me.  I wasn't actually breaking the rules, I was doing what I needed to do to have the most effective experience. 

So I love the first bit of the class where we dance around now. My teacher gives some instructions about focusing on gravity and root chakras and whatnot, but I just leave what doesn't make sense to me and focus on the music and moving my body and jumping around.  When we do unstructured yoga, I basically just try to do the same thing - a mini-practice I've created for myself - each time. I do a dead bug sequence, a couple of sun salutations, and then a warrior sequence. If there's time after that, I throw myself on the floor for some pigeon poses/other leg stretches.  So, at first this unstructured time was scary because I didn't know what I was going to do, but now it's predictable and it's comforting.

And then! The journaling. She usually has us journal at this point and I have taken to literally just writing down everything on my to-do list or anything that I've been focusing on while I'm doing the yoga piece.  

That means that by the time we get to meditation, my monkey brain has settled and I'm able to focus on my body and breathing. And I kind of feel like I'm high by the time we're done. Maybe more of a contact high than an actual high, but you know what I mean. 

When she asks me to share my journaling, I frequently tell her exactly what I wrote down and why and she's absolutely fine with it. 

Anyway, I do feel like this class is really helping me to focus on connecting with my own feelings and anxiety and how that manifests in my physical body. I'm converted. It's a weird class and probably not for everyone, but I'm 100% on the 20/20/20 train now.

6.6 Reflection - Daily Prompts in Month Six

Bestest Friend and I are doing a blog project. Each day we will write a blog post on a different theme chosen by a random noun generator. The theme for the sixth day of the month is "Reflection."

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I have just started the sixth month of this silly blog project where I write about a different theme each day of the month. I can not stress to you enough that these themes were chosen randomly and we didn't do a whole of editing of what words popped out of that random noun generator. Bestest Friend basically gave up after doing the project for two weeks, but I am holding strong. Last week I wrote a little bit about my writing process and Jenny asked if there were any themes I like better than others.  So today I'm going to reflect a little bit on this project and answer that question.

Themes

We have thirty-one themes, but obviously day 31 (Activity) doesn't get used every month (let's not talk about February and that chaos that it caused to my system).

I tend to think of the themes as easy versus hard and ones I enjoy versus ones I don't enjoy as much, so because I'm a social scientist, here's my taxonomy:

Most Fun

	Judgment	Winner	Message	Song	Method	Hat
	Drawing	Decision	Volume		Art
	Library	Location		Contact	Activity
		Meaning
Easier		Reflection	Entertainment	Relationship	Direction	Stranger	Harder
	Atmosphere				Information
	Moment		Instruction			Safety
				Family		Priority
	Complaint			Control	Failure	Depression

Least Fun

So, to answer your specific question, Jenny, I think "Hat" is quite hard, but is also really fun. It's really fun for me to wander around in my life trying to find hats on objects for photos, but I don't always have a good topic to go along with what I find.  I think things like depression and failure are both hard and not particularly fun to write about. A lot of the themes that I labeled easy are easy because I have a set way of writing the posts. 

Judgment: I write a book review
Drawing: If I don't have a drawing from my life, I put a photo of a town landmark through a drawing app on my phone
Library: I just post my library loans and holds
Atmosphere: If all else fails, take a photo of the sky and write about the weather
Moment: I can do a snapshot of the day post

There's a span of days that go Stranger --> Complaint --> Failure--> Control that just feels sort of heavy and negative, so that makes it sort of hard to keep the tone fairly light and that has proven to be a bit of a challenge for me. You might not believe it, but I try to keep things from going to super dark places in this space! I wish they were more spread out through the month. 

But I think that these daily prompts are somewhat helpful in that even the themes that I find more challenging to write about stretch my creativity and force me to think outside of my comfort zone. 

Hannah at the community center. What theme would you put this under?

The Next Six Months

What I'm hoping to do over the next six months is to maintain my consistency in posting and be able to explore different aspects to the themes than the generally literal meaning I've used. I'm also hoping that eventually some of the prompts that are harder for me to write start becoming a bit easier.

I'd also really like to be a bit more proactive in planning my topics. There are so many days when I look at the upcoming topics and I have nothing in my head to write about. I frequently have genius ideas pop into my head when I'm doing things like scrubbing the shower or walking the dog and I just don't take the time to write them down in my notes app on my phone. 

These words have become things I think about all the time and they have started to shape how I live. For instance, since one of the prompts is Art, I purposefully went to an art museum and I go out of my way on walks with Hannah to go by murals and sculptures that dot our town. I am always looking for small complaints to write about and things to celebrate for my winner theme.  I kind of like this, but I hope that these words don't start to limit how I live because I'm too focused on literal random words.

Possible Improvements

I think I might do similar blog projects in the future, but I would definitely make some changes. First, writing daily is exhausting. I think doing it two or three times a week would be sufficient! I also think it would be great if the prompts had been more tailored to my interests, although maybe I wouldn't have been as creative if the prompts were books, Hannah, Zelda, and backyard. Ha!

So that's my reflection on this silly project so far. What do you think of it? Are you up for six more months of hats?

5.31 Activity - Writing Daily

Bestest Friend and I are doing a blog project. Each day we will write a blog post on a pre-determined theme chosen by a random noun generator. The theme for the thirty-first day of the month is "Activity."

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Look at her heartbroken little face. She really likes to walk on the rivewalk and it's still closed because of all the melting snow flooding it.

It has come to my attention that some of my loyal readers are under the impression that I actually write on this blog every day. Just because I post daily does not mean that I actually write daily.  Most of the time, I write the majority of my blog posts on the weekends and it's relatively rare for me to be writing a post the day of or the day before something is posted. I mean, it happens, of course, but it sort of stresses me out if I'm not a day or two ahead of my own internalized deadlines. 

There are some posts that are harder to do ahead of time (e.g., Snapshot posts, Message posts when I post about the most recent photo message I've sent, library holds posts), but I like to be able to sort of write when I have several hours set aside to work on writing all at once. I really hate a empty page, so sometimes I just start typing nonsense into a draft post and most if it will end up getting deleted because as much as I think my stream of consciousness ramblings are interesting, I hardly think someone else will.  Having a chunk of two or three hours to just sit down and write all at once makes it easier for me to just get something on the page, even if I have to go back and change it later.

The daily prompts I use actually make it easier in some ways for me to know what to write about. I mean, sure I wish I had picked prompts that were more tailored to me personally, but there's something interesting that's happening to me with these prompts, which is that I'm now living my life thinking about "safety" and "control" and "atmosphere" far more than I ever have in my life. It's almost as if they've become mini-guide words for the year. So even though I don't know what I'm going to write about "safety" next month, I'm pretty sure it's going to be about the mammogram I'm going to get. I would have had the mammogram without these prompts, probably, but I doubt I would have written about it. 

I've written about this before, but I am reader, not really a writer. I must read every day or I feel like a part of me is missing. If I skip a day of writing, that's perfectly fine with me. 

Do you write every day? Do you consider yourself a reader or a writer?

3.17 Method - Writing Daily

Bestest Friend and I are doing a blog project. Each day we will write a blog post on a pre-determined theme chosen by a random noun generator. The theme for the seventeenth day of the month is "Method."

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This is my third month doing this writing project with Bestest Friend and I still haven't developed a good method for approaching the prompts. 

Do I plan what I'm going to write about ahead of time? That has worked fairly well for a handful of prompts - on day five I am going to use a drawing app on a local landmark (although I don't know if there are NINE more landmarks in town) for the "drawing" prompt, on day ten I'll write a book review for "judgment," I'll write up my library list on day nineteen for the "library" prompt, and I'll write up a post about the last photo message I wrote for day twenty for "message." 

But there are so many other days and so many other prompts and I don't want to be too rigid about how I approach the themes because sometimes I want to be able to just talk about baking cookies, my job search, or how the sun hasn't come out in days.  But I also don't like the feeling of an empty screen and a blinking cursor and me without a single thing to say about a topic.

I saw this toy truck at the base of a tree at a park when I was walking Hannah. There's nothing else to the story except I hope that there's not a child wondering where his car is.

I'm not a natural writer. I have to force myself to sit down each day and crank out a few hundred words and it's even harder when I really feel like I have nothing to say. I like this structure of a writing challenge because the constraints of the themes do keep me on track, but tomorrow I have to find a winner and right now that's seeming truly daunting.

Do you write every day? Do you plan it ahead of time? How do you find the motivation?

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To see what Bestest Friend has to say about method, go visit her at Too Legit to Quit.

NaBloPoMo 2021

 Last year I did NaBloPoMo because I figured I wasn't doing anything else. Ha! I did it again this year! I posted every day this month!  But this year I found a little community that was also doing it so I wasn't doing it solo.  San organized and here is the list of people who did it with me this month:

San
Tobia
Jenny
Stephanie
Stephany
Kristyn

I originally wanted this to be about lessons I learned doing this, but as I'm sitting here writing it, I don't have a lot that I think I learned. From June 2014 until June of 2015, I posted something here in this space every day as part of a blog project with my best friend, so I know that writing a little bit every day is possible, it's just something that needs to be prioritized if I need to get it done each day.  

Frankly it was easier in 2014-2015 to actually write something because I actually left the house (man, I went to concerts, went on a trip to Nashville, went to Michigan - for me NOW in 2021, it feels like I was never home). I felt like I was really phoning it in last week when I just posted cute pictures of my pets, but sometimes it's nice to just write about small moments so that years from now, I will have those memories of daily minutiae. I just went down a rabbit hole of those 2014-2015 posts and I wrote hundreds of words about absolutely silly things. And some of those silly things are fun to go back to.

But back to lessons.  I guess thinking about prioritizing things is a lesson. I prioritize walking the dog, reading, exercising, Spanish on Duolingo, and feeding my husband. I don't prioritize cleaning the toilets, keeping the yard maintained, or watching television.  Writing is somewhere in the middle for me. I write a little bit for work with emails, a research paper I'm working on, and constant revising of documents for my program, but I used to have a job where I wrote a lot more. It's not something I have to do every day, but it does feel like I've accomplished something when I hit the publish button.

The other lesson is that a little bit of organization goes a long way. I had an editorial calendar for this month's posts and I would just add ideas when I thought of them and I would highlight the posts once I had completed them. This kept me accountable when I needed to take photos or start thinking about what I was going to write about more than the second I opened up a blank post.  I'm not sure I'll be willing to do that for every month, but it was a good reminder that sometimes a big project doesn't have to be overwhelming - bite-sized pieces for everyone!

And the last thing I learned is that there is still an active blogging community out there! I don't know when we stopped doing blogrolls and people just seemed to stop blogging while I kept trucking away over here, but once I stumbled on San's post about NaBloPoMo, I was so excited that there were other people still regularly blogging!  Yay for new discoveries!!

Congrats to all the other participants this year. We did it! It was fun and I enjoyed reading all your posts.  Here's to doing it again next year.