As this festive season of blogging draws to a close, I am evaluating my feelings about blogs in general, this blog in particular, and my performance in the whole NaBloPoMo experiment.

With just a couple of missed days for Thanksgiving, I've held up my end of the bargain to post every day on this site. And true to my overachieving perfectionist ways, I plan to extend my month of blogging by two days to make up the lost posts. Will I continue daily posts even after my thirty days are up? Probably not. But I do think I have revitalized this little blog o' mine this month, or at least my interest in it. Blogging is fun again!

NaBloPoMo, for me, has been more than anything else an exercise in letting go--letting go of the need to post perfect little pearls of wisdom every day, the drive to give this site some sort of market-ready definition, and the fear of "shitty first drafts." In her book about writing, Bird by Bird, the wonderful Anne Lamott says this fear is the greatest obstacle to the craft. Shitty first drafts are inevitable, and if wannabe writers ever hope to produce anything of substance, they've got to sit down and pound out the awkward, flawed stuff first.

One of the most right-on assessments anyone has ever made about my character is that I am a "really bad beginner." I have a hard time letting on that I don't know exactly what I am doing all of the time. Luckily, motherhood has almost completely cured me of that hangup. Little challenges like NaBloPoMo keep me working on it. The deal was to post every day, and yeah, many days I posted entries that were not all that interesting, not all that eloquent. They were shitty first drafts, and--gasp--I posted them anyway, with no intention of going back to revise them and make them un-shitty. Did the world explode into a million pieces? Not to my knowledge.

The downside of NaBloPoMo is this: I am kind of sick of blogs. I've realized that the Web has become the new TV in my life. If I am tired (often), procrastinating (a lot), or bored (sometimes), I sit down at my desk and surf the Web. Sure, I often learn something or am moved by something I read. But sometimes, a few clicks later I am reading about what some woman in Minnesota did last weekend. And then I link to the blog of her friend in Ohio and read about how her daughter's pediatrician appointment went. Next thing I know, I am looking at the pictures of someone in Arizona's new puppy. I find myself following the lives of a few complete strangers as though they are characters in a soap opera. It's voyeurism, it's a waste of time, it's too much noise. I think after NaBloPoMo, I might embark on NaBloDiMo: National Blog Diet Month. I am going to don sweatbands and running shorts, break out the juice extractor, and cut all the empty calories out of my bookmarks file.

Right after I find out how so-and-so's first date with the guy in accounting went....