NaJoPoMo 2012
Created | Updated Oct 21, 2012
It's that time of year again, and Solnushka has a confession – and a suggestion.
NaJoPoMo 2012
I have a confession to make. I sometimes write elsewhere than h2g2
Thing is, I have a blog, and have had one since June 2006.1 I started it in a fit of admiration for another Hootooer’s little side project, but I continued it because I was interested in how it all worked. Plus it was an excellent place to go on and on and on without boring the sadly not completely captive audience on h2g2. These days I write, when I write at all, mostly about my children. And how clever they are to be learning two languages. And Russia. See what I mean?
However, one of my favourite blogging things is not to write about how many poos my youngest has done today2or how many times my eldest has bitten somebody at his new school3, but to take part in NaBloPoMo, or National Blog Posting Month. The idea is that you post one blog entry for the month of November. Thirty posts in thirty days.
This sounds easy. I never found it so, at least not if I was trying to write interestingly, wittily and in paragraphs. Which I was, in the main. Trying to, I mean. But winning, which I nearly always did, was extremely satisfying. It’s quite a bit of writing, when all is told. Also I rather enjoyed the adrenaline rush of seeing the midnight deadline approach while desperately wrestling a half baked anecdote about my son’s latest encounter with a dog in to some semblance of mild entertainment. Too much, actually. The reason for my one year of failure is because I pressed post a crucial few seconds after a new day had rolled around.
Then there was the interaction with other participants. Finding a niche in the great wide world of a thousand million blogs is good because that’s where the community is in the main. The mummy blogging crowd are fun. And the parents of bilingual children gang are both inspiring and reassuring. But one of the things I always liked about h2g2 is that its topic is everything, the universe and life, and so NaBloPoMo was also great because the only thing that people joining in had in common is that they weren’t doing NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, the push to write 50,000 words in a month and the original inspiration for the blogging event. Well, mostly weren’t. Some people did both. Mad dogs and bloggers. . .
Except that NaBloPoMo moved last year to BlogHer and became a very small corner in an uber community of women who blog.
It is not what it once was.
So it was fortunate that 2011 saw the launch of NaJoPoMo (The h2g2 Nation’s Journal Posting Month4). There were a lot of things I liked about NaJoPoMo. The sheer bustling business of it all. I know it wasn’t popular with everybody, but I rather enjoyed the way my conversations list went a bit mental. For a month. It would be tedious for everyday. Also, the posts themselves, many of which were outstanding. I wrote about that at the halfway point last year, and I can tell you, the writing didn’t get any less astonishing later on. But mostly the fact that as well as getting a leisurely catch up with what was going on with old friends, I met people from parts of h2g2 I barely new existed. It was everything I liked about NaBloPoMo, but right here with fellow Hootoovians, who everyone knows are more interesting that your average person
In fact the only thing I didn’t like was that I crashed out after only two weeks. Pants.
Anyway, we are doing it again this year. The page is here. More people seem to be plumping for a theme this year, as if the original challenge just wasn’t enough. Hahaha. Ahahahahahahaha. Hahahaha. Oh, deary me.
Go on, join us. You know you want to.
