For November 2013, I decided to try NaBloPoMo and post every day this month. I’d been getting all the NaNoWriMo emails, and while I didn’t have the time or story ideas (and Katie’s covering the “writing a novel” thing), I was a little nostalgic for a writing challenge. Today wraps up my participation in the event.

I learned two things about daily posting:

1. It’s not as easy as it sounds, unless you’re willing to count the equivalent of a Tweet or Facebook status as a blog post.
2. I would rather write fewer, higher-quality posts than more, lower-quality posts.

That quality vs. quantity issue especially bugged me when it came to my ongoing Les Miserables commentary. Those take a couple of hours to put together, and as a parent with a full-time job, free time is at a premium. I can think of a number of occasions when I sat down to work on my next article and realized no, I need to get a post up today, and I don’t know if I’ll have time to finish that one. Some of the resulting posts are worth it, including a few where I would have written a short note, but found that I had a lot more to say on the topic. Some, I’d probably delete tomorrow if I didn’t want to keep them up for the record.

I thought I’d do a breakdown of this month’s posts:

Broad Categories:
11 Life observations
9 Entertainment/reading
6 Photo-centric
4 Tech

Recurring Topics
5 Les Misérables
4 Trip to San Francisco
4 Local city observations
4 Comic conventions (the actual Long Beach con, wondering about WonderCon’s future)

Originality
19 Substantially new content at this blog only
4 Built around previously-posted photos (mostly from Instagram)
4 Short commentary posts linking to other content (3 of which were at least to my own stuff at another blog)
3 cross posts (two at Speed Force, one at Reading Les Mis)

I only resorted to blogging about blogging twice (except to fill out the links to my Les Mis articles and give them a little more substance), and only once did I just toss up a random photo to make deadline.

Full list (or if you prefer, a standard blog view of the posts):

• Escape from LA(X)
• Ghosts in the Cave
• Time to Read
• I Left My Trash in San Francisco
• New Les Mis Commentary: Gavroche’s Anonymous Family
• Nighttime HDR Test: Yerba Buena Gardens
• Airplane, leaving me to my own devices
• Catching Up on Les Misérables (Related: Argot at Re-Reading Les Mis)
• First Stab at WordPress/MySQL Tuning
• Hotels and the Illusion of Simplicity
• Somebody Hears You
• WonderCon in Anaheim for 2014, Long Beach Comic-Con Next Week (cross-post at Speed Force)
• Android App Crashing on Start? Clear the Cache
• Mobile: Design for Offline
• Duct Tape, Foil and Cardboard
• I Watched Three Les Mis Parodies Last Night (cross-post at RLM)
• Feeling Sheepish
• Gullible
• Important* Information† About Your‡ Account!**
• Daily Posting Observations
• A Walk Outside
• Feedly 404 Feedback Loop
• Light and Shadow in LA: What a Difference a Day Makes
• It Came from the Long Beach Comic & Horror Con 2013
• This is why I can’t see stars anymore
• Learn to Park!
• WonderCon Wants to Go Home (cross-post at Speed Force)
• Not Exactly Bifrost
• Les Mis: The Home Stretch
• A Month of Daily Blogging: NaBloPoMo 2013 Round-Up