Highlights from My Drafts Folder

Today marks the halfway point of NaBloPoMo! I know you're what thinking, "Wow! We are already halfway through the month and Vikki has yet to write the good blog posts she promised us in the beginning!" And to you I say, "Ouch." As I mentioned in my post at Mom2.oSummit yesterday, I do not plan for NaBloPoMo. I don't prepare things in advance and I don't have an editorial calendar. I've been told this is called "pantsing it" as in flying by the seat of one's pants. So, yes that is what I do which is funny since I spend most of my days trying to avoid putting on real pants at all. The challenge of this particular blogging method is that you often have no idea what you are going to write when you sit down to blog. I know you're what you're thinking, "But Vikki! We can never tell!" And to you I say, "I understand sarcasm."

When NaBloPoMo began, Melisa Wells of Suburban Scrawl provided some helpful hints to those about to undertake the challenge and one of her suggestions was to pull posts from your drafts and I laughed at her openly and as loudly as one can when your interactions are limited to social media. So, perhaps it is more accurate to say I "Ha Ha'd at her winky face emoticon, LOL" because my drafts folder is worthless. There are no beautiful ideas just waiting to be fleshed out or even half-baked ideas that have potential. There are a lot of posts that have titles but no innards.

But, my toes are numb and I wrote nearly 3,000 words on my novel today and I have to pick up my kid from a movie in 20 minutes and I need to blog about something so I pulled up the old draft folder.

I have 11 drafts but four have been published on other sites which means I really only have seven drafts. Of those seven, two of them have titles but no content:

Promote or Perish

Home Alone through the Ages

Don't those sound like they'd be interesting? If only there were words beyond the titles!

I have decided to share highlights from the few sentences in the other drafts just to assure you that there are no gems that I'm keeping from all of you:

From Eye for An Eye: "Mom! What does taking the high road get you?! A crumbling bridge and then you die."

From Things I'm Good At: "Keeping the home fires burning: Sure, the home fires may burn with impatience and rage but that counts! This type of burning is better than a house fire or a really bad urinary tract infection, right?"

From 46*: "I am aware that there are likely more years behind me than ahead of me..."

The last one is my favorite because I didn't even take the time to finish the only sentence in the post.

From Little Something Something: "Once upon a time, a child found a little something something i"

Maybe other people have draft folders full of smart and/or funny posts and they can just pluck one from there like a winning duck in the duck pond at the carnival. Mine is more like a box in the basement that hasn't been opened in 15 years and you open it with excitement only to find yourself wishing you had gloves and continuously saying, "But what is that?"

But the only thing to come out of all this--other than this poorly written post--is that I now have Draft Envy.

*Can you tell I was having an existential crisis on my 46th birthday?