Life for me lately is a constant struggle between things that I want to do and things that I have to do - then again, this has been the truth for much of my life. The current thing that I have to do is edit my thesis proposal. Some of you may remember that I had a plan to write my thesis proposal over the last two months, and then I would use these last two months of the year to finish some actual pre-thesis work and edit the proposal down to size. I didn’t have a problem writing the thing - the work went quickly and spreading it out over two months was definitely the way to go. However, now I have a 18,000 word thesis proposal breathing down my neck, waiting for me to do more research on it and edit it down to a more reasonable 12,000 to 15,000 words. I also need to come up with a good schedule which is reasonable and doable. I get the feeling that I am going to have to tone down my actual thesis work as it would probably take me more than a year to complete what is actually proposed in the thesis. I also feel like I will be at school doing lots of work over the next couple of months getting it edited to just the right amount - I feel like editing is a job which is never done, and I could actually work on getting it just right for a long time.

November, while also being NaNoWriMo, is NaBloWriMo, which is focused on people writing in their blogs. I like this idea because it’s much more casual and easier to do. Writing my thesis has shown me that it’s pretty easy to write 500 words a day, and I feel like that’s about the perfect size for a blog post, so I will probably try to keep each post around 500 words, without pastes and pictures and the like. So look to see a bunch more posts from me - I already need to catch up, I’m 4 posts behind. Diana is also doing the NaBloWriMo, but she is actually doing it on both of her blogs: Magickal Realism, the one for her business, and Fat Chic, her fashion blog. I hope she can get her posts written, and it works out okay.

In the past I have tried to post once every other day, and that didn’t work out very well, even though I had a bunch of ideas which were floating around waiting for a blog post. After a while I figured that I just only had a certain amount of writing in me per day, so while I was trying to power out my 500 words a day for the thesis, I couldn’t really blog. It was a pretty bad excuse, but it worked for me because honestly the blog is less important than the thesis. It might happen again, especially if I am spending a lot of time honing the thesis down to the bare minimum. That would be okay though, it’ll just be the norm for a NaNoWriMo attempt - a strong start and then not much useful at the end, and at least I’d be working hard on things that are important.