Remembering November

In a wig at a fall festival with my girls
Nose crinkle and crooked smile

It's the start of National Blog Post Month, or NaBloPoMo. I've done it for several years, mostly successfully. I figured last year would be my last because it was so hard, and it still might be. But I didn't want to say no for sure today, and so here is a post.

I barely wrote at all on this blog since last November. Really a conflagration of things -- church volunteer work, actual work for both a magazine and some other clients, my girls being in lots of activities and needing lots of parenting, some crocheting. Mostly I've written so much for the magazine, and I've been blogging for them about twice a month since the summer, taking all my best ideas. There are plenty of non-parenting things I could write about here, or delve into things in a different/perhaps more political or even religious way. But I just haven't. Maybe November is the time. Maybe.

Writers are going to write, but I just haven't been writing here. I still do my weekly emails chronicling my girls' lives, plus my work writing. There's a fair bit of reporting involved in that too, which is exhausting and actually the harder part for me. Hard things are worth doing and doing well though, so I persist.

I also haven't been reading as much. The number of books I've read this year is a measly 58 books. I put my goal at 75, and if I turned on my real reading skills maybe I could get through another 17. But I don't think that's likely given my workload and a few crochet projects and the general goofing around on Facebook (watching those "people videos" as Liv likes to call them -- cooking or how to do crafts) or reading Twitter (as a lament and/or to terrify myself about how bad things really are in our world). I've seriously given over so much of my life lately to this, and for what?!

Other things I've been neglecting include my mariwalker.com site, which I'd like to turn into more of a blog, basically a round-up of my professional work. On the magazine's website you can't see my work in any sort of order, particularly not chronologically. You can search for a particular article and find everything written by me, but there's no way to sort it. I can fix that and have a more permanent (for the web anyway) record of my writings by posting first paragraphs dated as when they were published, and linking to the full content on the magazine site. A project that wouldn't take too long (but takes longer the longer I wait because I keep writing and publishing stories), but I still haven't found/made the time.

Welcome to the best month. We'll see where it takes us.