A to Z Reflections

Well, I suppose it's time to officially wrap up this year's A to Z Challenge. It's been a blast and I will miss all the fun but's it's also a relief to get back to regular blogging and *gasp* maybe working on my novel! But first, reflections!!!

This was my second year doing the Challenge, and I feel as though each year I'll get a little better at it. Last year, I didn't have a theme and wrote every post on the day it went up. This year I planned a little bit more. I did have a theme (The Name Game!!) and before April began I had a list of topics for every letter (except 2 that needed to be figured out). I didn't write anything until the last day of March. I thought this would be the end of the world because I initially wanted every post written before April even began. 

It wasn't a disaster, though. What really saved me was having those ideas already figured out. My theme was sort of complicated in regards to putting topics with letters. I was able to rename topics so they could fit different letters, and so I was able to fit in every idea I wanted to write about. If I was figuring this out day to day, it would have been impossible. Actually writing the posts was not as hard as just figuring out where they would go. I thought I would eventually get ahead, but the best I ever did was writing posts the day before. A few I even wrote on the day they were posted, depending on how much I had procrastinated the day before (usually to the point where I was too tired to write the posts). 

I really liked my topic. I had fun with it. Some ideas came to me right away, others took a bit. I did feel like my enthusiasm wore out as the Challenge went on, and that my earlier posts were better quality than the later ones. I also kind of gave up on finding pictures or gifs to go with the posts. It was a hard topic to find pics for, so after a certain amount of searching and not finding anything, it was easier just to forget about it. 

Where I was really disappointed in myself was in visiting other blogs. I did not get around to a lot of new blogs. I would usually start the day by just going through my blog feed, but since a lot (A LOT.) of blogs I already follow were doing the Challenge, it was a lot to get through. A few times I did try to pick at the list, usually looking at the WR blogs, but I didn't do this as much as I wanted. I was also a minion/sidekick for the first time this year, so I did get to check out a lot of new blogs that way. 

All right, I'm rambling again so I'll wrap this up! Having a theme was super helpful, as well as planning out all of my ideas. I think if I do the Challenge next year, I'd like to actually write the posts ahead of time so that I'll have the month of April just to look at blogs. 

Don't forget to sign up for The Muse Party Blogfest!!! I've already gotten more signups than I thought I'd ever get (you guys are awesome!), but there's still room for more! It should be lots of fun!