Excess Month: Research Comes to a Close

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Promoters on Deansgate Locks #manchester #nightlife

A post shared by Matt Tuckey (@matttuckey) on Oct 30, 2018 at 7:02am PDT

I've just spent the last month preparing for National Blog Posting Month, or #NaBloPoMo2018, taking place over November. The idea is to post to your blog every day of the month. Blogger Amie Clouse is overseeing the challenge on her blog, Blissful Lemon. She's introducing the concept of 'Create30,' the principle of still uploading every day but not restricting oneself to blogging, so introducing other mediums like animation, knitting and photography.

This year, like last year, I'm writing to the theme of 'excess,' the idea that there is more than enough in life to keep you busy, meaning there's more than enough to write about. I may diversify into some of the above creative mediums.

October was a chance to prepare for this, with the intention of watching films on the theme of excess- rich people partying, messing their lives up, and making extreme decisions.

Whether I'll use that as a template for the next month remains to be seen.

Unfortunately, I didn't get to do much of this research as the streaming sites I used last year have largely been shut down, and I'm not on Netflix or the like. I was already reading The Sum of All Fears, a thousand-page war novel by Tom Clancy (still am), and I've been busy sorting out a holiday to Amsterdam and a long-term dispute with HMRC- both of which are behind me now. But, over the course of the month I met an astronaut, found out my colleague's dad beat up a well-known singer, watched a friend of mine on TV, attended a gym launch with a load of soap stars, photographed a building I used to work in before it got knocked down, signed onto a 5K run and started training for it, went to the opening night of a Deansgate bar and met a soap star there, and followed a Jamie Oliver recipe.

And that's just the preparatory month.

This is the 17^th post this month. I'm perhaps in danger of running out of ideas, making this year's NaBloPoMo more challenging than the last. It'll be more difficult on account of my phone camera refusing to work. Not sure what to do about that to be honest. The real work starts tomorrow. Last year I managed 30 in 30. Will I this year...?