A Blogger's Challenge

The challenge came in the form of a facebook invitation the other day: Write one blog entry per day for each day in the month of November.

All right. I think I can do that.

Now, you may have noticed that I'm not writing much lately. There's a reason for that. And a bit of a story.

As you may know, I began writing my blog in relation to a question that was asked at a gathering I was was attending. Someone asked the people there how they began their first children's class. How was it, he wondered, that we had gotten the children to come over in the first place, before anything was going on. As someone else there was responding, I was lost in my own thoughts. How, I wondered, had my wife and I began our children's class? And the memory of it made me snort out loud with a bit of laughter. Well, on the way back to my host's home the driver asked me what I had laughed about. And so I told him: my cat peed on my comforter.

For the full story, you'll have to go back to my very first entry here. (I'll let you search it with the little search box at the top of the green-ish box to the right. Just search "comforter". I don't think anything else will come up.) (If you search "cat pee", another story comes up. I checked.) (That's scary. How many times do I mention "cat pee" while writing about the Baha'i Faith?) (Don't answer that.)

Well, recounting that story reminded me of another story, which, in turn, made me think of another, and now, many hundreds of posts later, I'm still writing.

But why not as much these days? Simple. Back in 2009, when I began this blog, I was a stay-at-home dad taking care of my then-4-year-old son. I woke up earlier than he did (still do), and so would begin writing while waiting for him to get up. Every morning I had the time to myself to just write and write and write and write.

Now, he's in school and I'm back to working at my art: chain-mail fashion designs and jewelry. I work an outdoor market four days a week for six months out of the year. It's pretty much  full-time gig, what with working the booth for six months, and taking the other six months to make stock for the booth.

I just don't have the time any more to pump out a few articles a week.

And then I have fallen out of the habit.

That's where this challenge comes in.

Can I get back into it?

My first book just came out (Twigs of a Family Tree), and I'll likely be retiring from my chain work in the next five or ten years, or so. Might as well have this as a backup plan.

But it's November. And for me, that means Christmas shows. So how am I going to do this? Simple. Contrary to popular belief, this is not actually 1 November; it's really 27 October. (Shhh. Don't tell anybody. This'll just be our secret, dear Reader.) But I won't publish this until 1 November, so it'll look like I'm doing one a day. That's called planning ahead. It's a good technique. Very useful. I mean, you don't think that the Universal House of Justice actually writes the Ridvan Messages on the first day of Ridvan and just happens to send them out that morning, do you?

So between now and the first of November, I'll be writing as much as I can, as many articles as I can, in the possibly-futile hope of getting ahead and actually making this goal.

And who knows? Maybe It'll kick-start me into writing more regularly again. Here's hoping.

And see you "tomorrow".