So far in 2014, my most productive month was April when I took part in my first ever NaPoWriMo . It was pretty hard going for me to knock out thirty new poems in as many days on top of my day job but it was worth it. I follow one or two prodigious writers/poets who leave me constantly amazed by the quantity and quality of work they manage to put out there on a daily basis. What can I say, I am very jealous.
As to my NaPoWriMo effort, I was particularly pleased with some of the poems and I’ve since gone back and polished them up a bit. There were also some real stinkers in there that no amount of Mr Sheen was ever going to improve so I doubt I’ll revisit them in a hurry. As the saying goes – no matter how hard you try, you can’t polish a turd.
Overall though it was a really good exercise and one which I’ll repeat next year. But before that I have another difficult decision to make which is NaNoWriMo – should I or shouldn’t I? For the uninitiated among you that is National Novel Writing Month which begins in November.
Now if NaPoWriMo was a marathon, NaNoWriMo would be the equivalent of an Iron Man event for me . For NaPoWriMo , I might be able to slap a few lines of pretentious crap together and call it a Haiku but for NaNoWriMo that’s 50,000 words of pretentious crap in one month! Now that is hard, although thankfully quantity of words is apparently what’s important here rather than the need for producing anything half decent- the theory being, I suppose, that you’ve got another eleven months before the next one and plenty of time to polish that particular pile of poo. It’s still hard going though and I know if I sign up for it, I will absolutely want to meet the target do or die. I can’t help it, I hate failure- I’m just made that way.
What to do, what to do. I have just over a month to decide. Advice from the outside world gratefully received…
