One month and twenty-six posts later, I’ve made it to Z in the A to Z Blogging Challenge. This isn’t a notable achievement to anyone except me, but I am doing the dance of joy—not because the challenge is over, but because it turned out to be a far more enriching experience than I’d anticipated.
Rather than picking a word that begins with Z or writing about the letter Z itself, I’m going to use Z to represent of the end of something. It’s the end of the alphabet, and it’s the end of the challenge.
I’d never heard of the A to Z challenge until I happened across a notice on Facebook. I sniffed around the website, briefly considered signing up, and then decided to hang around the fringes instead. Becoming an official participant felt like too much of a commitment. I wasn’t sure I was motivated enough to complete the challenge, but I needed to take a break from my current manuscript, and I didn’t want to stop writing.
One of the rules of the challenge was to pick a theme and stick with it. I chose to write about writing. There’s no shortage of books, magazine articles, and blog posts about writing, but I’ve always figured things out by writing about them. I needed to explore my own thoughts about writing, inspiration, dedication, rejection, and all the other stuff that comes with the territory.
I got off to a slow, clumsy start, but as soon as I unpacked the C word, I knew in my gut that this challenge was what I needed. I needed to be pushed, and it pushed me. Some posts were easier to write than others, but easy wasn’t the point. I posted a few pieces I wasn’t entirely happy with, and I learned that despite imperfections, a post can be met with thoughtful reactions from sympathetic readers.
I am now officially in awe of writers who participate in NaNoWriMo. My twenty-six blog posts added up to about 18,000 words. NaNo participants churn out 50,000 words, an extraordinary effort for a month’s worth of work—and NaNo is in November, which means Thanksgiving, which means family and friends and entertaining. I repeat: officially in awe.
As I reacquainted myself with OS, I rediscovered the sense of community I remember from my earlier blogging days here. I reconnected with writers whose work I’ve always liked, and I discovered writers whose work I’d never read before.
As much as I complain about OS (“The site is down! What’s going on? Where’s the Mop of Hope?”), one of the things I’ve always appreciated about it is its built-in audience—but we’re more than an audience. We really are a community. Some bloggers on independent sites have huge followings; I’m not one of them. If I’d posted on a WordPress site, I wouldn’t have had the response to it that I had at OS, and the exchange of comments is one of the things that makes us a community.
The good news is that I rediscovered my enthusiasm and energy. The bad news is that I discovered I’m disgustingly self-absorbed. Christ on a crutch.
I won’t post every day, because if I do, I won’t get back to that manuscript that’s beginning to bubble and flow again, but I don’t plan to fall back into my slovenly, non-blogging, non-reading, non-commenting ways.
Will I do the A to Z Challenge next year? Maybe. It depends on how big a push I need.