NaNoWriMo in 10...9...well, closer to 45

National Novel Writing Month is about to begin. I tried last year and failed. I had a bet with another participant to motivate me last year. Unfortunately, she finished, I did not and it cost me a tee shirt from the NaNoWriMo store. However, I had a trip to Florida the first week of November and a trip up north the 4th week of November. It was the eternal optimist in me that thought I would squeeze out time on my trips to write. This year will be different. Somehow I will squeeze out that writing time. Or confess failure to a wider audience.

I think that I have to think about it more as an endurance test than a purely creative endeavor. Like making your self run or exercise. Flexing the creativity should be a benefit of the nanowrimo exercise but it is the forcing yourself to the keyboard for the daily jog that gets you there. I am going to see if I can find a word count widget for this blog. Otherwise I will just make dozens of short posts with date and count.

Hello world.

This is my first blog post. I am so attached to the online world now I thought it would be better to join it that to just lurk through. Plus, I won't have to subject my family and friends to endless emails telling them to look at this post picture story gadget etc... on line any more. So, this slice of the web will help unclog the tubes a little. I have read that it is best to have a focused blog or multiple blogs for various interests. However, I am not sure that that is the way I want to go. That would imply some kind of restriction on what I place here. That is not how my brain really works. To put this into perspective, I started this blog last night, was not sure how I wanted to start it and reopened it today. I then spent about 40 minutes looking at the features and gadgets that are available through blogger before it occurred to me that the blog looked a little silly without any text. So I place this text before I go out to enjoy the unusually beautiful late October weather today in Wisconsin. 

The picture for the post was taken on a family trip to Hawaii several years ago. However, the title is from a poem I remember hearing somewhere - Robert Bly I think - who  said a prayer on the lines of (and I paraphrase until I find the poem) "Help us Lord, for our boats are so small and your seas so vast."