The last entry for April 2022 A to Z Challenge, and it looks like I succeeded for the most part. I completed the challenge while having no prewritten posts or articles as the event started. I didn’t even decide to do the challenge until a couple days before it began.
Zebras
I wanted to work something into this post about Zebras and the time when I was very little and I looked out the front window of our house and saw two zebras grazing on a grassy slope between Mom’s peony bushes and our kitchen garden. I yelled at my mom to come and see the zebras. She came but she saw the neighbors two horses. Some part of magic went away that day. But I will leave the whole analysis of the experience for another day. I saw zebras. I really did.
Back to the present.
Zenith of This Year and Others
I literally went from zero to the zenith this month. Zippy, skippy, yippy. Success! I wondered if I would be able to complete the challenge especially when I lost momentum this last week and wrote most of the posts on the day they were to be posted. I am ever so grateful I have learned that having a rough outline of posts for the month, or project for that matter, is a major factor in completing the challenge or project.
I have completed the challenge before, years ago, but most years I was never completely happy with the outcome or something kept me from finishing the challenge. The A TO Z of Feminine Icons which was done in April 2018 was truly fun to write and shared some good information. The A to Z of Legacy Tools in 2016 was useful but I didn’t structure it well. I need to revisit those posts and all the other “Alphabetic Letter” posts and and spruce them up a bit with better featured images and rewrite the posts that were fails.
Always More to Do
Then to make all the writing worth the time it took to do the research and posts, I need to develop better promotion so that people can find them. Instagram and Pinterest are platforms that I did not effectively use. Plus internal linking within my own posts and writing is much more important than I understood until the past couple of years.
I also have to go back through my online writing and make sure I have made clear in my terms and conditions that my work is mine, under my copyright, but that these posts are unpublished work. This is how I have viewed them, as reading of my blog is like reading a letter, but I do intend to start publishing some of these works grouped in different ways as books.
So this is a success, a zenith for me. I’ve learned a great deal, gotten back into writing through themed bits of thought, become comfortable with my voice again, and managed, with more or less success, to be coherent. Success in A to Z also means finding people you want to read, and attracting a few people to actually read what you write. And the great thing about this is that you can continue to read and comment on this month’s writings after the official event ends. I do this, as writing the way I do, isn’t conducive to reading and commenting.
Last Post But More to Come
There are some challenge-related retrospective posts coming up that offer opportunity to synthesize and reflect on the process. I will be posting in these parts of the challenge as well, but I do not have the exact dates as yet. One is in the next week, maybe May 2, and another is later in May maybe starts on May 16 or so.