Let's try again. . .

        I am not a good blogger.

In fact, I’m a very bad blogger.

Look at this: I start out writing three days in a row, then a five day lapse, and then two months and twelve days. Can we say “fail?”

However, for the next month, I hope to do better.

Really.

My motivation, the way that I intend to motivate myself is to make it a part of a “NaNo-like event.”

Blank stares?

Ok, an explanation. For the past ten years I have been a participant in NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. Every November I manage to write a 50,000 word novel. Alright, not a novel, but a portion of a novel, but still — 50,000 words. This means that during November I write consistently. Maybe not every day, but consistently enough that I reach that 50k mark. I’m very proud of that and have a wall of my apartment devoted to my certificates. You don’t believe me?

 Yeah, I had to whip out my handy-dandy Sony Cyber-shot and capture this. I can see it from right here in the living room where I do my writing. The posters are all NaNoWriMo-related as well.

And while I had the camera in hand, I figured that I’d take a photo of my companion who is usually lying right next to my leg:

 That’s Slink. He doesn’t cooperate when I try to take pictures. Ever. So I decided to hold the camera in front of him and take the shot. Upside-down. You want me to flip it? Sure:

 Handsome fellow, isn’t he? He’s a rescue and maybe I’ll tell his story at some time, but not now.

Now I’m back to the explanation of how I plan to get back on track as a blogger.

NaNoWriMo is in November. I started in 2002 with several of my online friends. That year we kept Live Journals and posted what we wrote each day — and read each others’ work. That was as far as it went. I went into it thinking that I really had no ideas nor the discipline to write and came out with well over 50,000 words that really wasn’t too bad. It wasn’t finished, wasn’t a completed novel, but it was ok. Then I went back to writing fanfic and forgot about novel-writing until the next year. The next year I did it again, this time signing on to be a Municipal Liaison for “Pa: Elsewhere,” meaning anywhere not in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh. I continued my novel — sort of — writing a prequel to it. This time no posting to Live Journal — I’d heard somewhere that this could get in the way of it ever being published. Published. Right. But that was the first glimmer that I might someday take my writing seriously. Not that anyone else might take it seriously, but that I might.

Skip ahead several years. I now live in Maryland, am still participating in NaNoWriMo, am still an ML (Municipal Liaison) though for Maryland and sharing that task with two others. I have ten certificates for ten years of 50,000 words. I also meet with my writing group, the Corridor Writers, in months other than November. For the second year in a row, I have tried a 50k run during Camp NaNo — last year during June and August, this year so far during June. The summer writing has been a basic fail, at least as far as 50k goes. However, I have moved along in my writing. Last year I edited one of my novels to the point that I felt comfortable taking advantage of a free proof offer through CreateSpace. The book isn’t finished, not by a long shot, but my son and my mother have both read it. That’s a big step. Want to see it?

 I need to retitle it — my son suggested that “Second Life” would be misleading and that readers would expect something related to the virtual world of that name. When I finish the re-edit (whenever that might be — editing is very tedious), it’ll have a new title.

This year I edited another novel and submitted it during an open call. Still haven’t heard anything, but I’m looking at it as “I’ve got to get that first rejection under my belt.” And in June, though I didn’t make it to 50k, I did manage to write 26,349 words, writing all but four days during that month. Ok, some days were less than 200 words, but I wrote.

So now we get to this month: July 2012. Although there is no official event sponsored by the Office of Letters and Light (the parent company of NaNoWriMo), the members of my writing group intend to keep writing and to offer a spreadsheet to track our monthly writing. Good: this will keep me writing. But since it’s not officially a “novel” month, I’ve decided to count this, my blog wordage. I’ll still work on the novel that I started last month, The Clockwork Heart, but I’ll count what I write here as well.

Maybe this will be the motivation I need.

Maybe.

We’ll see.