After posting for 26 days out of 30 in April, I have to tell you that it feels a little weird that I haven’t posted yet this month. So I’m posting one last blog on the A-Z Challenge, reflecting on how the challenge went, and then it’s back to this blog’s regularly scheduled posting. 

I’ve already covered what a good time I had and how much my traffic went up during the month in my last two posts for the challenge, so I want to talk a little bit about what I learned.

• Interacting with other bloggers is just as important, if not more important, as blogging itself. In theory, I already knew this. I’d experienced it on a small scale prior to the challenge, but I really saw it in full force last month. Want readers? Want feedback? Want to have more fun blogging? Get out and read other blogs.
• Scheduling works. I’ve discovered the power of theming a set of posts, writing them all up together, and then scheduling them — and it’s glorious! I’ll be applying this lesson to more of my blogging from now on. It just makes sense.
• Short posts are easier on the writer and the reader. Less to write, less to read, and it’s pretty easy to see why it works when no one has time for much anymore.

Another thing: in terms of words written, this challenge wasn’t too bad. I wrote less than 10,000 words all month. I come from the world of National Novel Writing Month — where you’re supposed to crank out 1,667 words a day — and that number pales next to 50K. But it was challenging for different reasons, namely that instead of writing a story that only you know about during NaNo, you’re writing something that you want others to read and find useful. That puts a lot more pressure on! Trying to produce quality, beneficial material every day was difficult, but ultimately, rewarding.

Anyway, to sum up my reflection, the challenge was fun, I learned a lot, and I made new friends. What more could you ask for?

If you haven’t gotten a chance to check out the challege, see my index below. I’ve got all my posts linked from A-Z. If you want to read more blogs that did the A-Z challenge, check out the Linky over at A-Z with all the other Reflections posts.

An Index of my Adventure-Themed A-Z Posts:

• Adventure
• Books
• Create
• Draft
• Edit
• Fears
• Go
• Home
• Italy
• Jaunt
• Kayak
• Local
• Mythology
• Notebook
• Overthinking
• Passport
• Quotidian
• Realistic
• Short Stories
• Trails
• Urban
• Value
• Words
• Xylophone
• You
• Zenith