Well, wouldn’t you know it? There is an online movement called NaBloPoMo that encourages bloggers to write every day of the week for one month. The month in question is this one, November. This feat is regarded as the height of blogging commitment, even though when people force themselves to write daily, it is inevitable that the content isn’t always as good as it can be. I speak as someone who has more than a little experience of the blogging every day mantra, as between June and September, I wrote more than one post a day. Why don’t I get a blogging medal for that? What’s so special about November?
More important to those who read this space may perhaps be the reason why I stopped my little ritual of daily update. I stopped it not because, as some would think, something drastic or better or more important or more valuable has taken place in my life; I haven’t stopped because I am now pregnant and feel exhausted every two hours or because I only want to talk about the baby and feel like I can’t yet. I haven’t stopped because I am getting married and the wedding planner is taking up all of my time. I certainly haven’t stopped because something dreadful has happened; heck, I managed to update daily when I thought that William would die back in the summer.
No, no my friends, I have stopped for far less prosaic reasons than the above or any other. I have done so because us Virgos (or Virgoans, as some would have it), really love our mental calculations, the straightening of our own little plans into charts, the creation of a reality that looks totally under calculated control. I wanted to finish the calendar year with a set number of posts, 260 to be precise, which breaks down to 5 posts a week, every week of the year. It became soon apparent, around about March, that I needed to crank up the writing game by about one hundred notches if I wanted to meet my self-imposed statistical finishing line and so I calculated that, in order to be able to do so, I needed a writing spell of at least one post a day over a number of months. Come October, the numbers finally met me half-way through my daily life and now I can do whatever I want to do without asking myself whether there is anything worth snapping for the daily post.
While this is great in principle, I have found that I do not recall anymore what I have done in those weekends that I haven’t chronicled in here, even though all I talked about in many was just food. For one who has never kept a journal (working under the assumption that, what’s the point, if nobody but you reads it?), I must confess this feeling came as a surprise. I thought I would hate the self-imposed ringing of the writing bell, but I didn’t. While I feel like it’s confession time about the blog I may as well disclose the reasons for starting one anyway: I really wanted to yak about domestic life in all of its mundane permutations. It goes to show that writing indeed has a life of its own.
