2025-04-09: The first third#
In the middle of March 2025 I got an idea to move my blog from Telegram to an “independent” (at least not hosted on any social media) website.
The 2nd of April, something – sadly, I can’t remember what it was and credit it properly – reminded me about NaNoWriMo, which I held dearly, especially during my high school years. The last time I participated was in ~2018, and I thought it would be a good idea to write a bunch of blog post drafts as a challenge. Given that on March 31st, 2025, there was an announcement that NaNoWriMo shuts down due to lack of sponsors, it might be my very last opportunity to “formally” participate.
First of all, for some reason I didn’t expect the change of NaNoWriMo’s site layout. I actually postponed the start of a challenge for a day, because late in the evening I couldn’t understand why I can’t create an April 2025 Camp NaNoWriMo project. As far as I understand, this is actually by design and I should have signed up for Camp in March to be able to join it. I didn’t let that stop me, and started an “independent” (i.e. not attached to the ongoing challenge) project.
It turned out that the timing wasn’t the best either. I have unknowingly strained my back in the late March (more about it at 2025-03-XX Make Sure to Warm Up Beforehand), and during the first week of April I couldn’t walk or even sit much because of the pain. Less walking, among other things, means less experiences and less material to write about, not to mention that I had less energy for writing as my body slowly recovered.
Another mistake was to hope to produce high-effort posts during NaNoWriMo. I went by the rules of the main November challenge – produce 50,000 words within a month with little to no editing so the participant’s creativity can flow freely without stumbling upon shame and other obstacles – despite Camp rules allowing to do almost anything you want and how much you want from writing to editing as long as you produce enough words per day.
And while sometimes I produced my own writing, during a few especially bad days I had to literally farm the word count by creating new pages and inserting Obsidian templates and quotes from Wikipedia. To be clear, NaNoWriMo encourages cheating as long as you keep writing, and I was going to create all these pages anyway, but over-relying on this significantly hurt my satisfaction with my own work.
A few examples of cheating methods (keep in mind that NaNoWriMo’s goal is to write a novel, not a bunch of blog posts):
- “If all else fails, have a band of ninjas attack somebody” is official advice for writers at a loss for material to further their novel’s word count.
- Or Mr. Ian Woon (which is an anagram of “NaNoWriMo”).
- Or The Traveling Shovel of Death.
- Or a Trebuchet.
- Or drown someone in ketchup.
However, it isn’t all that dire. As I write, I constantly generate feedback for myself. Do I need more plugins outside of those mentioned in colophon to make the process smoother? Which topics even come to my mind when I have to write about literally anything?
Turns out that I tend to write posts about media that impressed me as short-forms and study notes on obscure (at least for a general audience) nerdy topics such as Haskell or accessing RSS feeds via Elfeed in DOOM Emacs. About which, to be honest, I wanted to write for a long time, but I felt that nobody would be interested in reading my Telegram blog if I wrote about these.
(this is pretty weird, since I know for sure that at least some of my readers work in IT and actually know way more than I do. huh)
2025-04-30: The End#
Today is the last day of the challenge, and I’m spent. A few lessons:
- I was doing rather fine until I switched platforms from Quartz to Hugo and Blowfish, while Hugo and Blowfish weren’t even compatible because of then-recent Hugo updates. For a few days I was literally paralyzed, as I didn’t want to write for Quartz only to have more posts to adapt to Hugo later.
- I didn’t install any other already working theme for Hugo; I tried to make Blowfish work, and it took way more effort than I expected. Both Hugo’s and Blowfish’ documentation were confusing at times, and some of Hugo’s features don’t work in Blowfish or work differently. For example, Hugo supports both LaTeX and KaTeX, Blowfish supports KaTeX only, and Obsidian plugins are made almost exclusively for LaTeX, creating the need to convert LaTeX to KaTeX before publishing any math-containing page.
- I was writing or fixing my site without any days off, which eventually caused a minor migraine episode. While no serious harm was done, I suspect that the whole “do something every single day without breaks!” format simply isn’t for me, no matter whether it’s about blogging, studying, etc.
- I was spending too much time on my laptop, and to have some rest I was… scrolling on my phone. By the end of the day my eyes were dry and my brain was melting, logically inspiring me to restrict my phone usage. This time I didn’t dedicate a separate “day without gadgets”: I stopped using my phone while I’m at home whatsoever, except for few cases when I need to use it (no, the urge to scroll doesn’t count). Fortunately, summer is coming, so I will be able to go outside, sit on a bench in the nearest park and scroll all the time I want – but still, definitely not from home.
- WRITING TAKES EFFORT. During the last few months of writing for my Telegram blog I got used to low-effort, more slice-of-lifey posts which I could get out of my head in 20-40 minutes. More niche, detailed and better-researched didn’t get the same amount of attention, and that’s why eventually I stopped writing them at all – and it was suffocating many posts about things that make my eyes shine, robbing me of any desire to blog at all. However, returning to at least middle-effort posts wasn’t easy – but I want to be the person who can do difficult things, so here I am and here is my WIKA project.
While I didn’t make it to 50,000 words, this NaNo is the first one which I actually finished. Until that my best streak was 18 days, but way more often I dropped the challenge during the first week. And hey, now I actually have my own site with some cool built-in features like localization and embed support!
As always, I can’t publish everything I wrote during the challenge. For example, some pages about the way cuprum garden functions were written specifically for Quartz and thus are irrelevant for Hugo + Blowfish.
But otherwise? I’m tired, yet happy. The challenge was definitely worth it, but with the same level of certainty I need to take a break from writing (and maybe from the internet whatsoever).
Stay tuned! There’s way more to come :)
