November Challenges

I didn't mention this yesterday, but I've embarked on the absolute madness that is NaBloPoMo. The quirky name is short for National Blog Posting Month and means that for the next 30 29 days, I will post on this blog every single day.

Those of you who’ve been here since the beginning will remember that last year I also gave NaBloPoMo a shot, only to toss my hands up in defeat sometime around the middle of the month when I just couldn't do it anymore.

This year, I'm going to do better. I realize now that set myself up for failure last time by making unreasonable demands on my creativity. I wanted to post fabulous photos, a complete original recipe, and an intriguing tale each day. Except that I forgot that I have a job to attend and a boyfriend (and self!) to feed and an apartment to take care of and that in November the sun has a tendency to set at, like, 3 in the afternoon so it's practically impossible to take decent photos of the food I make without having them come out looking shiny and orange.

So this year I'm taking it a bit easy. This, for example, counts as a post. As will the occasional gorgeous photo or perhaps a tip about cooking or a silly list of some kind. The goal is to relax a little and to just share those ideas that pop into my head with you...even if they're not always 100% complete, yet.

In addition to NaBloPoMo, I've also taken on a second and actually much more important challenge this month. I'm finally finally getting down to business on that book proposal of mine.

The truth is that I've been dilly-dallying on this for the past several months, but have finally realized that I just need to DO it. The problem is that without actual deadlines or accountability to keep me on track, I’m kind of hopeless getting things done. It’s why I really only clean the apartment top-to-bottom when I have company coming over or why I used to only ever start my term papers in college the evening before they were due.

So I signed up for proposal writing class that starts this Thursday. The syllabus indicated that we’ll get a concrete assignment each week and be led through it all by the teacher who is a literary agent, and a guest visiting editor or two. By the end of the six-week course, we are supposed to have a complete first draft. I figure that even if I were to only get through a handful of the assignments, I’ll still be that much closer to achieving my goal.

I’m excited about the amount of work I know I’ll be producing over the coming weeks although I may occasionally need a bit of encouragement from you all to keep me going. Many thanks in advance for coming along on this ride with me.