In a footnote to the post about Propo­si­tion 8 on November 7th, I said that it was the first in a series of daily posts for NaBloPoMo, the National Blog Posting Month, which I had just found out about.

Here I am a month later, having posted something every single evening. I covered humor; movie and book reviews; being the #1 tech blog (now #2); politics; Thanks­giv­ing; food; personal stuff; and even some technical posts. Whew!

Why bother? As with the two-year-old exercise in book reviews, it was a personal challenge to come up with a post every single evening for a month. Sometimes, the events of the day made for an obvious choice; a few days, I struggled to find a topic.

I have not been batching up posts, though I have a few ideas in the queue. When I was at Microsoft, I was startled to see Raymond Chen‘s blog post queue. He had at least two months worth of daily posts queued up on his personal, internal webserver—http://abject, I think it was called.

I’ve attempted NaNoWriMo three times, where the goal is to write a 50,000-word novel in the month of November. In 2001, Emma wrote about 23K words of Stargate SG-1 fanfic, while I churned out 41K words on a medieval fantasy. Neither of us has been willing to do anything more with those man­u­scripts. In 2002 and 2005, I abandoned my attempts in the first chapter.

NaBloPoMo was a sus­tain­able exercise for me. I’m going to continue trying to post something every day. It’s said that it takes 3-4 weeks of repetition to form a habit. We’ll see if this one has taken hold.