Monday, November 09, 2009

A Few Ideas For Those Engaged In National Blog Posting Month

November is National Blog Posting Month and those who sign up for this grueling task are required to post every day for the entire month. Every year I tell myself that I am going to do this marathon of blogging and every year I fail for the same reason. My birthday falls on 11/1 and after a full day of celebrating, I am rarely sober enough to find the keyboard, let alone write in coherent sentences. So I've botched it from the start.

For those of you looking to pad your blog with something other than YouTube videos of cute kittens or music that no one but you could give a fig about, let me offer up a few suggestions for topics to write about. These are also good suggestions for those of us bloggers who only have one good idea a month or have run into a "dry spell" or the even more debilitating "writer's block", the most dreaded of blog diseases.

What follows is a list of topics/titles that anyone can pick up and run with, without any real preparation and require only a smidgen of thought to complete. The linked suggestions are ones I've tried myself. Such as: Eight rules for dating my Ex. An article written as if it were an auditory tour of your home. Frigidity in Men. The goofy advice column. A parody of the hard-boiled detective story. Off-kilter fantasies or four short-lived crushes. An inappropriate children's book. What people thought of you at ages eleven through fifteen. Cartoon lawsuits. Aesop's screwy fables. Why aliens would want to kidnap you. An unlikely conversation between two animals. Someone famous from history uses Email or Twitter or Facebook for the first time and is addicted. How you embraced the concept of total honesty for a few days. Waiting for someone who is late, broken down by time. How to suffer fools gladly. Your blog is presented as a PBS pledge drive or a QVC commercial. Advice that an elderly James Bond might offer over drinks. An article written like the descriptions for expensive things in a catalog. A faux high school reunion newsletter. Describe your home as if it were a travel brochure for a foreign country. Write about yourself as if it were a celebrity "tell-all" book. A prayer to God to not let you die in a funny way. Write your living will. Explain something hard to understand stupidly. A character study of an idiot or boob that you know. If you were one of Jesus' disciples, what kind of disciple would you be? (Great for atheists or agnostics!) Tell us about your first sexual experience and the hilarity that followed. Describe a new drug on the market with it's unlikely side effects. What would your resignation letter to your blog sound like? You are publishing your first CD, what would you put in the liner notes? Tell us about doing a simple task badly. (This is perhaps my best video ever!) Make a long list of ideas you stole from comedy articles in the New Yorker magazine and pass them off as your own in the vain hope that this will make your friends think you are bright, savvy, and above all, generous.

I'd put a link up to the last one but you're reading it.

The staff here at Social Zymurgy; the culture of beer, would like to offer the above in an effort to aid struggling bloggers and writers everywhere because we all know that only poets and writers can save the world. We have left it in the hands of others for too long.

Doc

8 comments:

  1. Should anyone use one of these ideas, drop me a line. I'd love to see how it turned out.

    Doc

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  2. Can I just say that I absolutely love how your mind works?

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  3. Skyler's Dad- I love how my mind works to. I just wish it would do it more often.

    Doc

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  4. All wonderful and uplifting suggestions. We should all consider these important issues you have brought out into the open.
    My two favorites are "frigidity in men" and "an inappropriate children's book". It is time both of these to date mostly ignored subjects be brought out into the light of day.

    I did the post a month thing this past Jan. Previously I had threatened to participate in the truly whacky November Blogging thing, write a complete novel in one month. I failed early and yet they still send me emails.

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  5. Tell us about your first sexual experience and the hilarity that followed.

    Why just the first? I could start a blog just on that subject.

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  6. If only I had been sent some of these ideas, I might still be blogging today. Yours is a selfish love Doc! Happy Birthday! I miss youse guys but remain lazy as hell.

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  7. I love many, many of the ideas, especially when possessed by the really, really strange spirit of Commandant Lassard, but, don't some of these require a bit of effort? Can't I just put up a YouTube of cats clawing their photographer to death?

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