Image by J. Money via Flickr/Creative Commons

Since I'm a writer, blogger and feminist it should come as no surprise that Julie & Julia is one of my favorite films. I watched this great Nora Ephron movie Friday night and by the end my enthusiasm for blogging was renewed. 

I started thinking about Julie Powell and other bloggers who have been wildly popular and landed book deals because of their websites. The one thing these writers seem to have in common is that they were willing to do something crazy. Naysayers may call it a gimmick, and perhaps for some it is just that. But when I think about Julie Powell and women like Rachel Bertsche, author of the blog and book MWF Seeking BFF, they were all willing to do something that took courage and discipline, whether that was cooking 524 Julia Child recipes in 365 days or going on fifty-two friend-dates, one per week for a year, in hopes of meeting a new Best Friend Forever.

And so I present a challenge. 

November can be a lonely month for us creative non-fiction writers because in November many of our ambitious fiction writer pals are busy with National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo.

So I thought, what if we bloggers had a project of our own for the month of November.

Inspired by Tarayi Jones' #writelikecrazy, in which she encouraged writers to write every day for a month, I've decided to launch #bloglikecrazy for the month of November.

Here's the #bloglikecrazy challenge: publish a meaningful blog post every single day in November. That's 30 posts in 30 days. 

I've tried to do this several times before and failed miserably. But I figure I'd be a bit more motivated if I'm actually leading this endeavor.

So are you with me?

Project #bloglikecrazy will begin Nov. 1. 

Also, if you'd like you can sign up for me to send you writing prompts throughout November to help get those creative juices flowing. Just email me at javacia@gmail.com with #bloglikecrazy in the subject line and in the body of the email simply say "I want prompts so I can #bloglikecrazy!"

So does this mean that after blogging for 30 days you'll get a book deal? Probably not. But at the end of November you will be more dedicated to your blog and it's dedication that will help you make your writing dreams come true. 

So let's blog like crazy!

Photo by Joe Corrigan
Courtesy TechCrunch via Flikr/Creative Commons

“My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have to potential to be the comic stories the next.”  -- Nora Ephron

Author and screenwriter Nora Ephron died Tuesday at New York Presbyterian Hospital, where she was being treated for acute myeloid leukemia and pneumonia. 

While I am, of course, familiar with Ephron's movies such as Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry Met Sally and Julie & Julia, it wasn't until I started reading her obituaries that I realized how much more she had accomplished and the example she set for  women writers. 

As the Los Angeles Times notes, Ephron's "protagonists, who included the chef Julia Child and the whistle-blower Karen Silkwood, were often women and typically were just as capable — if not more so — than the men around them."

And as Mariam of Redbone Afropuff mentioned in a comment to a recent post on the blog, Ephron showed her that "yes, I can be a journalist, a novelist, a memoirist, and essayist, a screenwriter and a playwright all in one lifetime." 

Just to give a sampling of what she accomplished off screen, in the 1960s Ephron worked for the New York Post and then went on to write monthly columns in the 1970s for Esquire and New York magazines. Many of the pieces she wrote for these magazines were collected in three books of essays, Wallflower at the Orgy (1970), Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women (1975) and Scribble, Scribble: Notes on the Media (1979). 

Examples of more recent writings include her 2006 collection of essays, I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Reflections on Being a Woman and her 2010 collection of essays, I Remember Nothing, which takes a humorous look at the aging process and other topics.

Prolific is a word that just doesn't seem to fully describe her career, a career I'm sorry I didn't explore more when she was still with us. But her legacy remains to remind us to keep writing, writing, writing and to tell our stories no matter what.