A-to-Z Blogging Challenge 2013: Reflections

This year’s A-to-Z Blogging Challenge was, like last year, a lot of fun. I didn’t have a theme, but I did impose two restrictions: I gave myself a 500-word limit on articles, and I committed to writing a piece of flash fiction every Monday that was letter-related. The flash fiction challenge enabled me to dabble in genres and voices I haven’t tried before, and it also kept my creative juices flowing while blogging was taking up regular writing time. As with last year’s challenge, while I enjoyed writing many of the articles, the flash fictions were my favorites.

Of course, aside from the challenge of coming up with blog articles every day, the great benefit of the A-to-Z Challenge is the opportunity to make some new blog friends. I want to give a special shout-out to new buddies Rachael Featherstone, Tracy Kuhn, and Kirsty Stanley. Their blogs were fun and informative, they always responded to comments, and they left comments on my blog too. Thanks, guys! If you haven’t visited their blogs yet, please do so.

Finally, congratulations to everyone who participated and completed the challenge. I tried to visit as many blogs as I could, but I know I didn’t get to as many as I’d like, and I didn’t always leave a comment. But this is a huge time commitment. Just think–if you can write a blog article a day, imagine how much of your novel you can write if you give as much time to that! I’ve already calculated that if I wrote 500 words for each article, that’s 500 x 26 which is… 13,000 words. That’s about a fifth of a novel! Anyway, well done everyone! And thank you again to everyone that visited, commented, and cheered me on.

In case you’re curious, here’s a linked list of all my A-to-Z posts this year, and a list of all the posts I did last year. The flash fiction and short stories are colored green.

UPDATE: I have compiled all of this year’s A-to-Z flash fiction stories into a single PDF document. You’ll find a link to that document in the “Stories” tab at the top. Or you can just click HERE.

Did you enjoy the A-to-Z Challenge this year–whether you were a participant or a reader? If you didn’t participate this year, might you be persuaded to next year?

Program Note: The blog will not be nearly as busy over the next week or so (I think I deserve a bit of a break!). For the Doctor Who fans out there (both of you), I am planning to catch up with “Who Reviews” on the current series–I’ll probably take a week and post reviews of the episodes so far. We’ll see. Keep checking back… or better yet, subscribe if you haven’t yet!