I set out on this quest 19 days ago on a mission to provide you with quality content each and every day of the month of November. To that end, I have failed you. I started out strong with a good assortment of quality posts, but that well of substance had begun to dry up of late. I knew coming into November that this was going to be a difficult journey, much more so than my usual “No-Shave November.” The pressure to press on here, on top of being burned-out from work, eventually got the best of me.
I was going to try to come up with a valid excuse for my absence from the blogosphere. “As per NaBloWriMo rules, one is allowed to take at least one break of three days or more,” I would have written, under the assumption that I was the first person ever to come up with the concept of NaBloWriMo. As the founder of the movement I could have created any rules I wanted and they would have had to be considered cannon.
As with most great ideas, I was hardly the first to coin the term or consider the challenge. A quick Bing search found that there is much NaBloWriMo themed content already out there on the Internet. While it’s a little disappointing that I’m not exactly a pioneer in this field, it is comforting to know that there are others who have shared my struggle to consistently create content. Some blogs I’ve found started off strong before tapering off, while some stopped completely somewhere in the middle of the month. One Facebook page associated with the event even listed 15 posts as the benchmark to be able to be entered to win some sort of prizes. The bar isn’t set quite high here.
I will not let this discovery act as an excuse for me to give up on this project. It’s tempting when I’ve seen others have dropped out to consider doing the same. Instead, I will use their failures as inspiration to avoid suffering the same fate. When writers from the future contemplate doing a NaBloWriMo challenge and stumble upon this blog, I want them to find a completed portfolio of a month’s worth of content. This blog will not be resigned to the same fate as others. The name of Jacob Albrecht will never be associated with failure.
So here’s my pledge to you, readers. As we enter the last third of November there are 11 more days left in the month. I will do my best to finish this thing strong, providing you with the best writing I can muster. I’ve recharged my batteries this past weekend, and plan to end this thing with a bang.
Let’s get this party started (again).
