A to Z Challenge Blog 2018 – Reflection

A to Z Challenge Blog 2018 – Reflection

Another A to Z Challenge Blog has come and passed. This is my third year doing this. This year I tried something different. I chose to rant and also have positive thoughts on a number of topics. I created some fictional characters and let their dialogue handle all of my thoughts.

I started with Herman and Otto. Herman is the positive one and Otto the ranter. After a while, I decided that people might get bored with only the two characters, so I added their wives, Minna and Lina. They were also polar opposites, with each other and with their husbands. I could mix and match these characters depending on the situation I was debating.

Knowing that this was going to be the basis of my writing, I brainstormed with my family, friends, colleagues, and students (that I worked with while substitute teaching) ideas that I could write about.

Here is the list of ideas that were brainstormed prior to and throughout the month. The highlighted words were the topics I ended up choosing to write about:

A: Alcohol, Anxiety, Adulthood, Apathy, Autos, Anger, AutoCorrect  B: Boredom, Books, Barter, Bees, Bugs   C: Computers, Cars, Cliffhangers, Change, Climate change, Clowns, Crying     D: Drivers, Doctors, Dreams, Dogs    E: Endings, Empathy, Electronics, Exercise, Education     F: Fandom, Forecasting, Flying    G: Gratitude, the Good Old Days, Gardening, Gifts    H: Habits, Homework, Hearing, Horror I:  Imagination, Illness, Idiosyncrasies     J: Jerks, Jaywalking, Jocks    K: Keyboards, Clocks, Kissing, Karma, Spelling with the K sound    L: Listening, Lectures, Learning, Librarians     M: Mistakes, Millennials, Meat, Music    N: Nothing, Nonsense, Noise, Names, Nervous, Negative, Numbers    O: Orders, Organic, Old Age, Opinions, Originality, Outer Space    P: Performing, Politics, Pronouncing words, Pizza     Q: Quiet, Questions     R: Relatives, Recovering, Road trip, Read aloud, Rumors     S: Storytelling, School, Substituting, Serenity, Siblings, Sports, Social Media, Schedules    T: Television, Traveling, Time, Teenagers     U: Unconventional, Umbrellas, Unions, Uttering, Unable, Undecided, Username    V: Volume, Vegetables, Video games, Values    W: Worrying, Waiting Rooms, Weather, Winter    X: X-rays, Xerox copies, Xhaustion, X-marks the spot, Xpectations, X-Mas    Y: Yelling, Youth, Yawn, Yesterday, Yoga, You’ve Got Mail, Why, y r u doing this?    Z: Zoos, Zero, Zeal, Catching some ZZZs

If I was really stuck when it came time to write about a particular letter, I went to a dictionary and searched out words that might inspire me. Such was the case with Forecasting, Idiosyncrasies, and Schedules. One of my pieces, Values, I wrote as a part of a Mindful writing workshop during February and March. I just reposted it for the A to Z piece. That piece was the first time I got to play with dialogue between the

two main characters. Finding a picture for “Crying” was hard. I couldn’t find a picture of a girl comforting a boy crying. Most of the ones online were stereotypically a male comforting a female, or a male comforting a male, or female comforting a female. I found one that was somewhat indistinguishable and chose to use that.

My goal at the end was to make the final entry for “Z” bring all of the characters together for a mini summary of what they did and sign off, which I had fun doing.

All in all, this worked well for me. I had some difficulty picking a category when I was filling out the daily posting form. I wasn’t sure how to label what I was writing about. Education topics were easy, but for the most part, I chose Author/Writing (Other).  I was using a social media delivery tool to schedule the pieces I had written beforehand. Hootsuite worked well except that when I set it up to schedule a post that hadn’t been published yet, it loaded the page that didn’t exist yet to cue. When it did publish instead of including a picture from the blog entry, it posted “Page Not Found” on Facebook. It was not consistent with that, sometimes it worked right. Even though the link was a good one when it posted, it never changed the “page not found” image. Even when I deleted the entry and re-entered it live, the same graphic showed up. I had to go into the Facebook post and insert a GIF that connected to my topic to replace the “page not found” screen. I’m not sure if that decreased the number of hits I got. I switched to dlvr.it to do most of the ending posts but discovered early that I couldn’t include #atozchallenge with my post. For a while, I was editing my posts on Facebook after they were published to include the hashtag. I figured out how to include the hashtag in dlvr.it eventually so all my subsequent posts included it on Facebook without me having to edit it. Twitter, on the other hand, does not allow you to post #anything on your scheduled posts in dlvr.it. And Twitter does not allow you to edit a tweet, once it has been tweeted already. So the last half of my tweets had no #atozchallenge on them. Again, I’m not sure how that affected the number of viewers I got.  Dliv.it had some difficulty with some of my posts on Facebook, adding a picture to the post. Sometimes they came up with a blank box and other times they showed up with a picture. I never figured out what caused it. These are all things I hope to resolve before next year. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

As to next year, I have no clue as what to write about. At least I have a few months to think about it. I didn’t get a chance to read many blogs from other people during April, though I did bookmark a number of them and hope to catch up over the next few weeks.

For those of you that are interested, here are the links to all of my blog entries for this year’s Challenge Blog “Attitudes and Gratitudes”:

A: Adulthood B: Bugs C: Crying D: Doctors E: Education F: Forecasting G: Gardening H: Homework I:  Idiosyncrasies

J: Jocks K: Spelling with the K sound L: Librarians M: Mistakes N: Noise O: Outer Space P: Performing Q: Questions R: Road trip S: Schedules T: Television U: Username V: Values W: Winter X: Xpectations Y: y r u doing this? Z: Catching some ZZZs

See you all next year.