What a waste of an evening. My son and I were trying to cook up some kind of cobbled together gaming set up for him with some old mismatched pieces and it looked like we could maybe get it working but for want of the right kind of cable. We bought something that seemed like it would work but it didn’t. In my attempts to figure out why, I made the situation worse and now we have a completely useless monitor that is just cycling red, green, and blue screens, and xbox with a disc stuck in it, and a $40 cable that fits in the ports on each, yet doesn’t allow the two things to see each other. Hours down the drain.
So NaBloPoMo is in the books, or in the blog archive. I missed one day, probably one-third of my entries were posted after midnight (though if I haven’t gone to bed yet, in my mind it is still the same day), and many were so short as to hardly count as writing. If I do it again, I think it would go better if I planned a little ahead of time and had some drafts ready to be used on days when I couldn’t manage to get around to it, or was thwarted by internet connection problems.
The crappy connection is really a nuisance because I’m usually spending a bunch of time looking for a song before I start writing. On days when the song is already in my head and the entry is about the song somehow, either it jogs a memory or it’s related to something that’s happening, the post is easy and I can do most of it without the internet at all. Other times I don’t have a song in mind and it can take a lot longer to find the right fit, especially since I really try to mix it up and not just go back to my old standbys all the time. Hard to believe sometimes, I know, but I really do like finding new music and given that I had thirty days to fill up, this was the time to do it. Those days were really frustrating and time consuming when I’d have trouble just getting a video to load, let alone go back and forth between several while trying to decide on the one I wanted to use.
This month was also challenging because of all the things I crammed in. Two shows in one week that had me driving 3-4 hours each way, Thanksgiving up at my mother’s, and the kids had only one week that was a normal 5 days of school. I’m not sure who came up with the idea for NaBloPoMo (or WriMo for that matter) but I think a better month to propose would be March or April.
My main goal of blogging was never to be a writer. It was to have a way to share thoughts and ideas about music and bands, or tell a story about why a song had some deeper meaning for me. I used to do that in real life with friends but now my friends all live somewhere else and so writing became the only way I could keep doing that. I heard from one of my friends that even though some of these posts this month were skimpy (my words), she thought it was great to “hear” from me every day. If I look at this experiment as a way to make that connection with people and music, and focus less on whether my writing was the best it could be, then I guess it was pretty successful.
November 30, 11:45 p.m., NaBloPoMo, Lights Out, Words Gone.
Noisy Cats 