No(vember)

It’s November and my reader and notifications is filling up with posts about participating in 30-day blog posting or novel-writing challenges. (Yes, I know that there are acronyms with lots of syllables and mixed cases invovled, but I’m not in the mood to type them in properly.)

I’m wishing luck to all those participating. Have fun! Write! I’ll try to follow along with as many of you as I can manage.

But I’m not joining in.

Blog posting every day would not be that difficult as an exercise for me. I just don’t want to commit to it in a month where I know I will be continuing to deal with the changing day-to-day demands of dealing with my mother-in-law’s health issues stemming from osteoporosis. (Could I put a few more prepositional phrases in that sentence?) On a happier note, we will also get to have our younger daughter home for Thanksgiving week from her grad school, mostly coinciding with a week’s visit from our older daughter and her spouse from Hawai’i. It will be their first time back since Christmas almost three years ago, when L. proposed. I may be overflowing with news and decide to post when they are here or I may be too busy with visiting and multiple big family dinners. Also this month will be a poetry anthology submission deadline for Binghamton Poetry Project plus a public reading and a Bach and Haydn University Chorus concert with attendant extra rehearsals.

I actually do have an idea for a novel which has been in my head for over five years. I even started it once. But I have made a more recent commitment to pursue poetry. To a poet, fifty thousand words is not one book, but a wall full of books.

Come to think of it, it’s actually somewhat odd that I, who have trouble saying anything briefly in prose, have felt drawn to poetry that concentrates thought into as few words as possible. While there are great epic poets and, more recently, prose poets who use lots and lots of words in their work, I’m not drawn to either of those forms. (You can thank me later.)

So, all you bloggers and novelists – and poets, enjoy your November, whether or not you have chosen to write/post daily. You have a lot of company, either way.