I Did NaBloPoMoDoReMi Because…

Now that the blog posting month thingy is over, I’ve noticed a few people criticising the process because “it’s not that big a deal”, or “it promotes shitty blogging”. While I don’t disagree with either (I’ll be the first to admit my own dodgy entries) I have to protest: I did do it for a reason! A reason that goes beyond seeing if I can do it, seeing if I can post quality stuff and the experiments with my hits.

I did it because I’ve failed NaNoWriMo (that month where you write a novel with 50,000 words) on multiple occasions, and wondered if it was because I am so bad at writing fiction. I thought that if I write about the Internet, about myself and all those other things I can do, that I would be able to finally see the 50k word goal through.

Turns out that I fail at non-fiction too. I’ll let you guess how many words in total I posted last month (and no, it’s not even close to 50,000).

23 comments so far

  1. Alyssa said:
    On 04 Dec at 8:55 pm

    I’d say…10,000. This is because I write fiction, and a three-page story is about 3,000, so, yeah, that’s my logic.

  2. Aaron said:
    On 04 Dec at 8:56 pm

    Uhm… 12,803 words? Higher or lower?

  3. Carly said:
    On 04 Dec at 9:31 pm

    16,034 … maybe….?

  4. Vera said:
    On 04 Dec at 9:36 pm

    I don’t need NaBloPoMo or NanoWriMo to realize that a) I’m lazy and b)if I’m forced to blog my entries are going to be execrable. So if I’m ever going to decide to make myself give up blogging I’ll join one of these two :P As for word count: I’m really bad at guessing.

  5. Vasili said:
    On 04 Dec at 9:54 pm

    Uhh 21,000ish…? I can’t imagine trying to count all the words, even with your l33t PHP ninja powers!

  6. Amanda said:
    On 04 Dec at 10:01 pm

    30 entries x average of 400-500 each (long entries making up for short entries), I’d say 15,000 words?

  7. Rammi said:
    On 04 Dec at 10:14 pm

    My guess is… 14292?

  8. Kris said:
    On 04 Dec at 11:01 pm

    I guess.. 12 words…

  9. Katy said:
    On 04 Dec at 11:07 pm

    42

  10. Chantal said:
    On 04 Dec at 11:11 pm

    How ’bout half? 25,000

  11. Han said:
    On 05 Dec at 12:12 am

    I have trouble turning on the computer everyday now let alone blogging! I don’t do anything interesting anymore!

  12. Casey said:
    On 05 Dec at 1:21 am

    You blog a lot, Jem. More than me.

  13. Kaylee said:
    On 05 Dec at 1:51 am

    I guess 16,273 words. But if you wrote 50,000 I wonder if anyone would actually read it… ;)

  14. Niki said:
    On 05 Dec at 3:07 am

    I don’t even need to guess. Your blog is more successful than any other blog I’ve known. Well, some blogs I see with more than 100 comments, but who cares? You put interesting things into your posts whilst the others don’t; they add just an “Oh, I added this to my site” or a “Yeah, I’ll hit the sack”.

  15. Mumblies said:
    On 05 Dec at 7:21 am

    8,564?

  16. Phil said:
    On 05 Dec at 8:33 am

    6?

  17. Annie said:
    On 05 Dec at 9:09 am

    17,675?

  18. Brigitte said:
    On 05 Dec at 11:32 am

    20,000 is my guess … you’re making me wonder how many I wrote now.

  19. Rachael said:
    On 05 Dec at 11:48 am

    8,750 words, including quoted text, but not including blog titles or meta information. And if you don’t believe me, I’ll send you the .doc that proves it. :P Haha, I’m so sad… :(

  20. Jem said:
    On 05 Dec at 11:51 am

    And if you don’t believe me, I’ll send you the .doc that proves it. I already know the answer, so you wouldn’t need to prove anything. Although, I didn’t include quoted text or code in my word count because that’d be cheating. Neither did my Mum, by the look of it. ;) So yes, all of you saying 20k and so forth – waaay too much faith in my ability! :o The grand total was approx 8600ish. All I can say is that it gives me new found respect for those who complete NaNoWriMo.

  21. Amanda said:
    On 05 Dec at 12:39 pm

    It looks like I gave you entirely too much credit. :P …though really, I just did a word count of my own, and it looks like I gave myself too much credit too. I wrote approximately 8300 words in November…though considering that the nature of my entries tend to be chattier and less “this is my knowledge, learn from my wisdom” than your own, it’s still a fairly decent effort. :P (indulge me!)

  22. Maz said:
    On 05 Dec at 1:59 pm

    NaNoWriMo isn’t that hard – you don’t even have to write anything good, no one’s going to read it. ;) 8k isn’t bad for blog entries, considering they were something worth reading.

  23. Grant said:
    On 05 Dec at 2:27 pm

    nearly 9000, wow thats awesome! I wonder how many you have wrote on this whole blog?