A to Z Reflections

This was my third year of doing an April A to Z Challenge (altho’ only my second time participating “officially”,) and I’m finding that I enjoy it more and more each year. It’s hard, make no mistake about it, but you learn over time how to best prepare yourself. 

For me, I don’t do well writing all my posts ahead of time - too often, I look at my words, think, “I don’t want to use this!” - then spend the evening scribbling like a fiend. But if I don’t write any of them ahead of time, I end up with days when I’m reduced to showing you guys Rudolph Nureyev dancing with Miss Piggy or pretending that stringing together a bunch of letter words counts as actual writing. (see “F”- 2014, or “W”- 2016) 

(I enjoy those fudges, it’s true, but they aren’t exactly living up to the spirit of the challenge…)

So this year’s game plan was to go into the month with a complete list of alphabetical topics, with at least two alternates for each day, and to have at least 2 posts for each week written up ahead of time. (Again, I ended up not using all of them… but they made a lovely safety net.) This plan seems to work well for me. I still hit stressful spots but they were of limited duration.

The other thing that helped increase my enjoyment this time around was a change made at the organizer’s level. 

Prior to this year, you signed up ahead of time in one ungodly long list which you then had to pick your way through, finding other blogs to visit and comment on, while hoping someone would notice your name in the list. It was overwhelming and irksome, both because it was cumbersome and also due to the number of people who said they’d do it, then didn’t. (Altho’, given my Cookie Exchange experience, that didn’t surprise me… but it’s still irritating.)

This year, however, we posted links once a day, one for each letter. 

Granted, this was a bit tedious (and took many people well out of their HTML-comfort level) but overall, I think it was a far better way to document participation. Instead of a single list of nearly a thousand to slog through, each day, you only had to weed through 200-300. That is a lot more manageable… with the additional benefit of providing more of a clue to what exactly you’ll be reading about once you get to the other blog. 

So, despite the fact that the daily linking added yet another thing to my morning “to-do” list, I liked the change. I would like it even more if it were possible to weed out the deleted comments where people realized they’d borked the code for linking but I realize that’s a huge undertaking and unlikely to happen. (It would sure make the list more manageable, tho!)

I also found that people were much better about circulating around and commenting this year. Last year had been disappointing. This is, after all, a blog-hop, so I'd expected to see more people willing to play ball. This year, there was a lot more visiting in evidence. I suspect the improved handling of the participant list had much to do with that. 

I was also pleased that there didn’t seem to be quite as much blatant self-promotion this year as last. Maybe I just got luckier but I did seem to find more people this year who were simply here to meet other bloggers and expand their horizons, as opposed to drumming up interest in their own work. I saw a lot more comments that actually said something about what was written than those quick, "Good post. Please visit me at ___" comments of last year.

On the subject of comments, I'm going to admit that I do get a bit torqued by people who can’t be bothered to respond to comments. This is not confined to the A to Z Challenge, however - it always irritates me. I figure if you want people to talk to you, you should at least be prepared to acknowledge that they have spoken. To my mind, you come across as a condescending git if you don’t.

The above thoughts, however, are merely one woman’s opinion.

The part that's important is that I enjoy participating in the Challenge. It's tough and I'm always brain-dead at the end of it, but I like meeting new people, finding new blogs, and seeing how other people set challenges for themselves. For myself, I just enjoy trying to come up with something interesting to say about subjects that you wouldn't necessarily think could sustain more than three words. But there are some terrifically creative people out there who tackle some really interesting themes - frequently in ways that humble me - and I love having the opportunity to find them.

None of this, however, would be any fun if you guys didn't play along.

I love that all of you are here.

Thank you for that.