#AtoZChallenge – Reflection Post

This was the first year I had heard about the A to Z blog challenge–and I heard about it serendipitously when I was pondering publicity options for my release of Dust to Blood. So it served a two-fold purpose: To see whether I could blog that frequently, and to gather some of my notes and thoughts about background for my book as reference materials.

It turned out so well, I’ve created a table of all those links on my book’s permanent page. I got to share some of the really fascinating bits of research about Russia that I uncovered while I was writing the book–people are still giving me positive feedback about the pictures I found of Manpupuner. And it’s always fun to look through model portfolios to find the face that comes closest to representing an individual you’ve fabricated.

I’m finding it a fascinating side to myself that when given some sort of pseudo-competitive framework (like this one or NaNoWriMo), I’m able to stick to a regular schedule with relative ease. You’ll notice after April came to a close, I was silent here again for a week. Not that I don’t have a lot of excuses for needing some time off… but the A to Z challenge did prove to me that I was able to sit down daily to commit words to post. It worked especially well to have a schedule in place and know what I was going to be posting about.

Returning to the original focus of my blog–book reviews and author interviews–I’m thinking setting up a regular set of days where I’ll be posting (tentatively: Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday) is in my not-so-distant future. Putting together the image, tags, and categories as well as the tentative date the piece might right seems to keep my head in the game effectively. Stay tuned to see whether it works for the longer haul.

😉