Time to Start Blog-tober 2017!

It is October!  A month of pumpkin spice, scary stories, spooky decorations, and colder weather.  It all culminates in a night of costumes and candy, where once again the Buhl household will be giving out full-size candy bars and a can of soda to every Trick-or-Treater..  Also, it is another month where I attempt to write 31 blog posts in 31 days.

I’ve been doing this for a couple of years now, mostly as a way of preparing for NaNoWriMo.  I figure that if I can find the time to dedicate to a blog post every day for a month, the exercise will help me get in the habit of working on a novel every day for a month.  Blog-tober shows me the places in my daily schedule where I can get some writing done, and helps prepare me for the next month.

Last year, I failed at the blog challenge pretty early, then failed even worse in NaNoWriMo.  I came into the season low on energy and low on motivation.  This year, I’m planning on turning that all around.

To help make this year’s blog challenge successful, I’ve made a list of topics I can write about, one for each day.  It’s a rough plan, set more in clay than in stone.  There are gaps, too.  Here is the list of planned topics:

  1. (Today) This Announcement!
  2. Rancho Cordova River City Concert Band
  3. RC Swing
  4. Works in Progress
  5. The State of Science Fiction
  6. Current Events
  7. Literary Theory (for Michael)
  8. (Sunday) The Effects of the Political Environment on Everyday Life
  9. Teaching My Niece
  10. Listening to Music While Programming
  11. Plotting, Planning, and Winging It
  12. Lying
  13. Current Events
  14. Trucks (for Richard)
  15. (Sunday) What it Means to be a Liberal
  16. Parenting
  17. Listening to Music While Writing
  18. Making Characters Come Alive
  19. ?
  20. Current Events
  21. ?
  22. (Sunday) What it Means to be a Conservative
  23. ?
  24. ?
  25. Adjectives Are Delicious
  26. ?
  27. Current Events
  28. ?
  29. (Sunday) My Views on Money
  30. Halloween – What it means to me
  31. Finale – NaNoWriMo

I’ve made a note for each Sunday, as I think those are going to be days where I can tackle larger topics.  I’ve also set Fridays aside for talking about my thoughts on whatever is in the news at that time.  I going to write about writing topics on Wednesdays.

Many of these topics were suggestions given to me by friends.  If you are reading this and there is a topic you’d like to see me write about, leave me a comment with the suggestion.  You can leave the comment here, on my Facebook, or on Twitter.  Whatever you suggest, I will probably add to the list.  The topic doesn’t necessarily have to make a lot of sense.  For example, Richard suggested “Trucks” so I added it to the list.  What am I going to say about trucks?  Who knows!  If I stick to the schedule, everyone (including me) will find out what I think about Trucks on October 14th.

So that’s the idea, that’s the announcement, and this is the first post of October 2017.  It won’t all be politics and ranting, though there will definitely be quite a bit of that.  To provide context for myself in the future should I look back on this post: Yesterday, President Trump attacked the mayor of San Juan, Porto Rico.  Today, he said that Rex Tillerson shouldn’t bother with negotiating with North Korea, suggesting that we’ll take care of it with military action.

It’s going to be really hard to talk about things that aren’t political this month.  But we’re going to give it a try!