I survived the A to Z Challenge! It has been a very interesting month (April, 2013). The challenge involved writing blog posts regarding a subject that begins with a letter of the alphabet every day except Sundays. Before I joined the challenge, I was lucky to have had more than one blog post a week. I found it difficult to find something to blog about and felt that readers would find my random thoughts boring. The moment I found out that there was such a thing as an A to Z Challenge, I just threw caution to the winds and joined. I figured it was the best way to force myself to post every day.
The first few days before the start of April (the challenge was to start on April 1st), I was browsing through the different pages of A-to-ZChallenge.com and found a comment made by someone regarding how to effectively create blog posts. The gentleman commented that he had already had all his posts scheduled for publishing on his blog. That gave me an idea.
You see, it is not easy for me to be online everyday. There are times when responsibilities at home eat up most of my time. There are also days when power cuts make me want to throw my laptop against the wall (in our village, powercuts can last as long as 10 hours or more). So I decided to write as many posts as I could well in advance and simply schedule the publishing of those posts. That helped me a lot.
During the challenge, I learned that there are letters of the alphabet that are not so easy to find topics for. For example, the letter "X" left me sooooo desperate that I had to beg my Facebook friends to offer suggestions (they took pity on me and made wonderful suggestions). One of the most interesting suggestions was from my friend Chona who suggested I write about "X-men" and she meant those people who used to be men. Her suggestion was genius! But I thought it might be controversial (that or I might get in trouble for using "X-men" in the post). So I went for a tamer topic -- xylophone.
Being part of the A to Z Challenge also allowed me to find some wonderful blogs. It was great to find such interesting bloggers out there like Maui Jungalow, Peanut Butter and Whine, Scribbler's Sojourn, and many, many more.
It has been a really enjoyable month. And I hope to join the challenge again next year (if they will have me... hehehe).
