The Most Magical of Months

First off, this isn’t a “Sorry I haven’t been writing, I promise to do better” post. The last post in this blog is from December 2020, and that’s fine. There’s a very good chance that there will be a big gap between a similar post this December and November of 2022, when I do this Buck Fifty thing all over again!! 

That’s right! It’s back! So I’m back. This time last year I joined in with a small but passionate community to write just 150 words a day for the month of November. Others do NaNoWriMo, where they try to write the first draft of a novel in a month, or Movember, where they try to grow a mustash in a month. I can’t do either of those things, the former because that is typically around 50,000 words, so, yikes!, and the latter because it’s itchy. So, so itchy. 

But 150 words I can do. In fact, I already did it! I successfully wrote 30 posts during November last year, each at least 150 words. Actually, not to brag, but my shortest post last year was 180. You have no idea how much I had to talk myself out of making this post check in at exactly 150 words. 

Weirdly, while writing what you’ve read so far, I almost felt Iike I was cheating. I had originally sat down with an entirely different post in mind, but as I started typing, this is what flowed out. For a brief moment I caught myself thinking “Is writing about the Buck Fifty challenge itself a valid post?” But the answer is “Yes! Absolutely!!”. 

And I like it. It sets the scene for the next 30 days.

The joy of Buck Fifty is that it doesn’t have to be a single novel length coherent story, or a perfectly manicured facial hair. It can be whatever you make it. A stab at that script idea you’ve had bouncing around. A series of tabletop RPG ideas. Designs for a board game or video game. Movie or game reviews. Short stories. Not a whole novel, but 150 words at a time on an aspect of the world. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s a month of daily blog posts written to amuse and inform, but mostly, written for you, the writer, to look back on in years and decades time and think “I’d totally forgotten about that hilarious day. I’m sure glad I wrote it down in this online public diary format that I can reference at any time.” 

Now, wouldn’t that be something?