To do or not to do

It’s that time of year when people are doing things because, for some reason, organizations have chosen to stuff these events into the last few months of the year.

Should I participate these things? Let’s have a look-see:

Halloween

I don’t really do Halloween, other than maybe enjoying some of the decorations people put up in their yards around the neighbourhood. That’s enough for me. That, and watching the Peanuts Halloween special. Also, Halloween is technically just one day, even if candy shows up on store shelves three months before October 31st, so it’s pretty easy to just say I’m not taking part. Maybe some alternate universe version of me dresses up as a vampire and goes out to costume parties to all hours of the night. I’m happy for that version of me, with his suave goatee and all, but it’s just not this universe’s version of me.

Inktober

I used Inktober a few years back to help rekindle my interest in drawing. It worked! I have not drawn much over the summer, for various reasons and thought about doing Inktober again (using my own rules, of course, because I’m a rebel). But today is October 10 and that means 10 of 31 prompts have already come and gone. Yes, I could just wave them off and start with #11 tomorrow, but it would bug me that I was missing a bunch, and I’d try to catch up, and maybe it wouldn’t go well? I don’t know. I think I’ll mull this for one more night before deciding.

National Novel Writing Month

This is coming up in November, as it always does.

I was thinking about whom the ideal participant in NaNoWriMo is and this is what I came up with:

1. New writers looking to establish a writing habit. To win, you need to write 50,000 words over 30 days, or about 1,667 word per day. It’s demanding and forces you to make time to write, and 30 days is enough time to build a habit.
2. More seasoned writers who have lost their mojo. For basically the same reason as new writers, a seasoned writer might find that NaNoWriMo gets the wheels turning again, allowing them to return to stalled projects or start fresh on something new and shiny.
3. Masochists who don’t mind spending 30 days writing what will likely be a garbage novel that will require a lot more than 30 days to fix.

I used to be #1, could make an argument for being an unpublished version of #2¹Techincally I got published in a Moose Lodge newsletter when I was 12 years old, and mostly feel like I was secretly #3 all along. I’m not sure if I want to invest the time writing to end up with something that isn’t very good. Writing under the pressure of NaNoWriMo certainly gets you lots of words, but I feel trying to complete a novel in that 30 days leads to a lot of shortcuts, sloppy writing and what you’re really doing is trading the satisfaction of completing a specific goal–a 50,000 word novel in 30 days–for the long slog of fixing that same novel and turning it into something readable, effort that may have been better spent just working on a novel without the pressure cooker 30-day deadline.

I mean, if you feel you need the deadline just to get something happening (#1 or #2), I think it’s valid, but you need to be prepared for a lot more work afterwards to turn that dashed-off novel into something good. Because why would you write a novel, otherwise?

Based on the above, I think the odds of me taking part in National Novel Writing Month 2023 are pretty darned slim.

In conclusion

I’ll probably just stick to my own list of tasks, which is chock-full of stuff that I shouldn’t let myself be distracted from, anyway.