#IntPiPoMO - It's A Thing! Again!

Unlike some people I am very definitely not doing NaNoWriMo. Not this year, not ever. Probably.

For a long time I believed it was inevitable I would one day write a novel. When I was at school, aged around eleven or so, we had an English teacher who could have strolled out of Evelyn Waugh's "Decline and Fall", a book I would lay good odds he'd never heard of, much less read.

He had a number of work avoidance techniques but perhaps the most effective for his purposes was the year he used one lesson a week to sit back and read the paper while we worked on our novels. At the end of the year he collected them all up and that was the last we saw or heard of them.

I can still remember some of the plot, such as it was, of the one I wrote. I know there was a dog in it. And some waste ground. And much of it was set in Seville.

I'd been to Seville. I'd seen a lot of waste ground. Write what you know. I didn't own a dog but my imagination could stretch that far, even at eleven. Especially at eleven.

Hey! I have a lampshade just like this!

After that I didn't bother with long-form fiction for another couple of decades until, in the mid-80s and early 90s, I ran two lengthy fiction series through the APA that served as my main creative outlet for a decade or so.  The idea was that they would end up as novels but they probably never even amounted to novellas before the APA and I parted company.

I still have both of those and I occasionally toy with the idea of dusting them off, tarting them up and stuffing them down the internet, just for the sake of immortality. Then I remember I'd have to re-type the lot because I usefully saved the originals on some floppy disk format that time has long forgotten and I lose all enthusiasm.

It's more than likely I will never write a novel. Not impossible. Maybe when I retire. The older I get, though, the more I realize that, whatever my natural gifts as a writer may be, they do not lie in long-form fiction.

I want this goop cleaned up right now, you hear me?

I can't plot for a start and I have no ideas. Character I can do and I like to imagine I have a prose style. I can knock out the equivalent of recital pieces to order but there's precious little call for two-thousand word prose poems outside of a writing retreat, more's the pity.

No, I'll stick to blogging, for now. Probably for good. Turns out I've been writing short essays, opinion pieces and reviews pretty much non-stop for thirty or forty years now and I think I might be starting to get the hang of it. May as well carry on.

NaNoWriMo can struggle along without me for another year but that doesn't mean I'm skipping every November challenge. As Stargrace reminds us, it's also the return of IntPiPoMo, the action meme inspired by the old saw "A picture's worth a thousand words".

Here, let Chestnut explain it - it's her pony after all.

Look into my eyes. Look directly into my eyes. Now give me a fishie.

Put simply, it's posting fifty pictures in a month. I do that every month. A challenge would be not posting fifty pictures. It's particularly welcome this year, though, because my post count for 2017 is dismal. It looks as though I'll be lucky to hit a hundred and fifty posts by the end of December, which would be my lowest full-year total since I started blogging.

Not that I'm saying I'm going to use IntPiPoMo to pad my post count but it's a great excuse to slap up a screenshot after a busy day and call it a post. And I do take a lot of screenshots...

So, welcome to #IntPiPoMo 2017. I even used the hashtag.