The 30 Day April Challenge

This April, I am going to do something that I’ve never done before.

Which is to write and publish a blog post every single day for the entirety of the month.

I have been heavily inspired by the National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, which is to write a 50,000-word novel in the month of November. For you to win the event, you need to follow a simple set of rules:

1. Writing starts on November 1 at 12:00:00 a.m. and ends on November 30 at 11:59:59 p.m.
2. No one is allowed to start early.
3. Novels must reach at least 50,000 words by the end of November in order to win. These words can either be a complete novel of 50,000 words, or the first 50,000 words of a novel to be completed later.
4. Planning and extensive notes are permitted, but no material written before the November 1 start date can go into the body of the novel.
5. Participants can use any genre, theme, or language. According to the website’s FAQ, “If you believe you’re writing a novel, we believe you’re writing a novel too.” Various forms of fiction are allowed, including fan fiction (which uses characters or settings from the published work of others), metafiction, novels in poem format, or screenplays. Even “rebelling” by writing something other than a novel is allowed, including non-fiction, video games, scripts, or academic writing, as NaNoWriMo is considered a “self-challenge”; rebels are allowed to self-validate and receive any prizes from sponsors.

As seen, it’s an event that encourages the participants to just write, to just complete an idea they have, and to just finish something. There’s no pressure on you to write something great or even good, you’re just required to write. Following this idea, I’m going to do a similar thing this April, just to see if I’m able to do such a thing or if I’ll break before the end.

However, don’t expect these posts to be the usual quality they have. It’s actually going to be the opposite, with multitude of grammar errors, badly structured paragraphs, incoherency… Basically a mess. The whole idea is to write about stuff that are cool and interesting to me, for myself; to clear up my mind, to learn something, to internalise. To do that, I will still need to set some rules for myself, similar to NaNoWriMo.

1. From April 1st at 12:00:00 AM to April 30th at 11:59:59 PM, there must be a post on one’s website every day.
2. The time that the post goes live doesn’t matter as long as it is public before midnight (though, it might differ by a couple hours for me due to time zone changes I will have, but they will still be live before midnight from my point of view).
3. Posts should be about a single thing, they should have an extent and an end to it.
4. Topics written during the challenge should not continue on more than a single post, they might be adjacent, but there shouldn’t be any “multi-part” blog posts. However, it is also encouraged to extend on things that one might find interesting after the challenge is over.

As a sneak peak, I want to write about: esolangs, low-level programming, matching engines, FPGAs, web development, book/movie/TV show reviews, AI, complexity stuff, and etc. So, I hope to put all of my ideas and thoughts out into the world this month!