Blog-A-Day Coming to an End ... Or Is It?

I am so excited. I can hardly believe it. I am almost to the finish line of this blog-a-day in the month of May challenge. I started getting really excited about this over this past weekend when I realized I had blogged more days than there were days left to finish the challenge.

So I decided to join the National Blog Posting Month group over at http://www.nablopomo.com/. Officially, National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) is November, but you can pick any month to take the challenge. I submitted my blog for the May blogroll (it isn't posted there yet though) to celebrate my accomplishment and snagged a cool widget (see my right column) and graphic to post on my blog to mark my accomplishment.

Since I can take the NaBloPoMo challenge any time I like, I may not wait until November to blog-a-day for a whole month again. In fact, I am thinking my next blog-a-day project might be a Be Here Now month-long mindfullness experiment similar to the one conduct by ChronicBabe website founder Jenni Prokopy. Here is the post that started Jenni on her journey. And here are the lyrics to the Ray LaMontagne song that was the inspiration:

"Be Here Now"

Don't let your mind get weary and confused
Your will be still, don't try
Don't let your heart get heavy child
Inside you there's a strength that lies

Don't let your soul get lonely child
It's only time, it will go by
Don't look for love in faces, places
It's in you, that's where you'll find kindness

Be here now, here now
Be here now, here now

Don't lose your faith in me
And I will try not to lose faith in you
Don't put your trust in walls
'Cause walls will only crush you when they fall

Be here now, here now
Be here now, here now

Here is a link to hear the song: http://songza.com/z/ot2tn6

Another idea that my friend Cyndie shared with me is writing something called a blovel, which is a novel in blog form. You can read more about it here. There are suggested rules for a blovel, which include:

• each post is 500 to 1,000 words long
• each blovel is about 40 posts long
  
• a blovel post is published at least once a week, ideally daily
  
• each post ends in a cliffhanger
• the blovel is written in first person
• a blovel does not allow comments like an ordinary blog post
• once a post is published, it can not be editted
  

It is a great idea and I have signed up for a Blovelspot account. The tentatively title of my blovel is Beneath the Surface and it is in the sci-fi genre. I am considering this blovel as my project for National Novel Writing Month, which is November each year. There is a website from this group too: http://www.nanowrimo.org/. I have some website reading ahead of me here to learn the rules and figure out how the writing word count widgets work. Looks like they don't have things set up yet for the 2009 competition...

I am also committed to blogging the week of September 14 to 20 for Invisible Illness Awareness Week, which is the offical annual campaign of Rest Ministries and Hopekeepers. I have joined Bloggers Unite and signed up to support this event. I also plan to explore the Bloggers Unite website to find more causes that I can support by blogging.

So you see, the blog-a-day in the month of May challenge is becoming a jumping off point for more writing projects and ideas ahead of me and I can't wait to continue writing!