Reflections on the April A-Z Challenge 2013

The Blogging from A – Z April Challenge 2013 is done.  And I posted a majority of the days, in fact 84.6% of the time. I am a survivor!

General Reflections about the Challenge

• I benefited from the accountability to post (almost) daily during April. Once I started writing I didn’t want to break my streak and so wrote something 22 out of 26 days.
• I found out about the challenge the night before it started. Therefore I didn’t have any posts written ahead of time. Each morning I woke up early to write. I found this to be a productive and enjoyable time. I hope to keep up with morning writing.
• What I did was to (mainly) finish up drafts that had been in my draft folder for at least a year. I thought these would be a snap to complete. WRONG. I still spent around 2 hours per post.
• I went though my drafts and picked 26 to finish. (I did change 3 or so posts as I went through the alphabet.)  I put them in a list here and hot linked them as they went live. This helped me to focus on each day’s post. And since the title was already in “ink,” I was more motivated to finish it that day.

What I liked

• I liked having the categories for the blogs. At the beginning of the month I went through the list and looked for the bloggers who had a craft  or writer blog. Even though I don’t do a lot of crafts or consider myself a writer, I like to read such posts.
• I liked the requirement to turn off word verification. All the blogs I visited did not have this on.
• I also liked the suggestion to read the five blogs after your name. With so many blogs on the list and having little time to read, I sometimes I didn’t know where to go. I was fairly regular about reading these blogs though.
• Finally I liked the Facebook page which I discovered about at the end of the challenge.

New (to me) Bloggers I Enjoyed

• Freelance Tourist: Travel Tips
  
• Sue’s Trifles
• Waiter, drink please!
• WRITERachael
• Words and Palabras: A Spanglish Blog About My Life in Mexico

I Will Participate Next Year

• Even though I didn’t write according to a theme, I really liked reading the blogs who did so. So next year I will write theme-based posts.
• Another thing I will do differently is to pre-write as many posts as I can. In fact I have already scheduled myself to do that January-March 2014. That way I hope I can spend more time reading posts in the A-Z Challenge.

Be sure to read my posts HOW TO Get People to Read Your Series: 9 Ideas.

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NOTE: This post is written for the Blogging From A to Z Challenge. There are 22 categories for the blogs and my category is MI = Miscellaneous.

During the month of April I posted 22 out of  26 days  (mainly) finishing up posts that have been in my draft file for at least a year. For a list of all the posts go to the A-Z button on my header.

Today’s topic is Reflections on the April A-Z Challenge 2013.