If you can't beat 'em, join 'em and hope shame helps
So. We have a new little project here, it’s called NaBloPoMo, National Blog Posting Month, and it is what I like to think of as the realistic alternative to NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. The idea is this: generate some written copy every day for the month of November. If you are on the blog tip, you blog every day; if you are doing the novel thing, I believe it is 50K words during the month. I shudder to think. But, my friend Kelli is doing it, which I know because Facebook actually works for something.
I have found over the course of my life that in lieu of actual motivation, public shaming seems to be a pretty effective tool — for me personally, anyway. I am not recommending involving other folks in your openly humiliating tactics, this is not middle school gym.
Even better than actual public shaming, along the lines of six hours in the stocks on the village green, is quasi-public shaming, which is sort of how I see this blog. Actual evidence (Google Analytics: there, my secret is out) coupled with anecdotal evidence suggests that while there are folks reading it, there are probably not even quite a dozen of you (and I love you, each and every one, please keep reading). This means spectacular failure on this blog is relative, and confined to a group of people I either already have established relationships with, or possibly, their friends and other lurkers who I do not and may never know… so the motivational pressure is high, but the actual consequences of falling, if I may be permitted to evoke k.d. lang at this hour of the morning, are minimal.
Aren’t I clever? Waiting to explain my plan until the first day of the month and thereby knocking out my first post with what is essentially an explanatory note?! I tell you.
I have another update, which is on the music project. I confess to you all that it has been slowed not only by laziness (and a 24 hour flu this week, over which I will mercifully keep the curtain drawn) but by a latent and unexpected attack of what-will-the-cool-kids-think. Trying to strategically select a track every day is wearing me out. Our new plan is chance. I will reshuffle my party shuffle every morning, and I will play the first thing that comes along. I give myself ONE out every day, if it’s loathsome and I’ve been trying to flush it out for extermination, I can, but only once. I can already see that this project may also spawn another project, clean out the iTunes library, but we’ll do what we can.
Today’s musical wheel of fortune reveals:
Liz Phair – 6′ 1″ – Exile from Guyville
(Released 1993, the year I graduated from high school, and about 10 years prior to a very appalling moment driving down the Kennedy when I heard the sad state of affairs that is called “Why Can’t I?” … which if that is what you know of Liz Phair – don’t judge Guyville by that. This is a really great opening track, and to my mind very representative. A good omen for this chance thing! NB I will not falsely claim I was aware of this album when it came out, I got hold of it in grad school.)
Tune in tomorrow, same Bat channel….