Over half way!

It’s the 16th of November. No it isn’t, it’s the 12th of November, but I’m writing this in advance and queuing it up to publish on 16th November. So from your point of view, it’s the 16th November. Which means I am over half-way through NaBloPoMo.

So the challenge of NaBloPoMo is to write a blog a day. But I can’t always do that, and WordPress has this handy tool whereby I can write stuff and set it to publish later. That’s not cheating right? That’s acceptable smart time management. I thrash out a few posts when I have time and then go back to real life for a few days. When I started this I had 2 posts pretty much ready to go. It turned out Terry had 16, and a few more half written and abandoned ones from years ago. Was he cheating? Or just way savvier than me?

He seems quite insistent that I am cheating by not tweeting or facebooking each time I post. If I tree falls in a forest and no one hears, does it make a sound? Well, yes, as is obvious to anyone with a rudimentary grasp of physics. But I think his argument is that if I blog without telling anyone, and that blog goes unread by anyone except me, (and him if I asked him to proof it) then this is not in the spirit of NaBloPoMo. So for the latter part of this challenge the training wheels are coming off. I will not only blog, but I will tell people I am doing so. People with eyes and brains and terrifying opinions.

Doing this has been really hard as it is, and I’m still pretty freaked out by the notion of putting my ideas ‘out there’. In the digital world everything is forever. I’ve written some reasonably controversial stuff over the past 2 weeks. What if years down the line my views on personal finance or being pro-choice come back to haunt me? Of course if I had a scrap of integrity and courage I’d stand by them anyway, but I am amongst other things a first-rate coward.

But then again, maybe someone will read what I’ve written and take comfort, inspiration or just entertainment from it, and feel better knowing that someone else has fictional conversations with their non-existent progeny, or thinks making savoury ice cream is perfectly acceptable behaviour.