Reflections on #AtoZChallenge2018

The customary Reflections on the A to Z challenge I find interesting.  Sometimes I get round other people’s, people I had intended to see more of during the month, and then work back through their post.  Sometimes their Reflections post is all I really want to read.  But I do read, and enjoy, them.

Thank you to everyone who visited, and especially to the A to Z team who work so hard to provide us with the Challenge each year.  It’s become a monster, and they are doing well to tame it!

Reflections on my blog posts

I really enjoyed doing this year’s challenge posts.  My theme was ‘inspirations for my writing’ so it was probably my most personal set of posts. There’s more of the real me, and my background, than in most of the rest of the blog.

It was also bitter-sweet, and my celebration of Norfolk, the Broads, the wildlife and so on, came at a time of change for me, one that you got a hint about on Friday.  But I also got to delve into parts of my inspiration for my scifi which drew some interesting comments, and suggest I should talk more about interesting things I see in the science blogs and press.

Maybe that’s why I’ve decided to blog daily during the National Wildlife Trusts’ 30 Days Wild Challenge in June!  Come back for that 🙂

My favourite posts: Epping Forest, Other Bloggers and Writers, and eXoplanets

My most visited posts: strangely (since I didn’t look till after I’d done my favourite) top was Norfolk, then Epping Forest, Other Bloggers and writers, then Dylan and Dougall

My most commented on posts (including my responses): Norfolk, Other Bloggers, then Castles, Epping Forest and Tolkien tied.

One other reflection is that people liked my technical and fact-based posts. I’ve decided to take the posts I do for my other books on their sites and reblog them here. That started Thursday with the first of the audio clips with my dad’s memoirs.  For those of you who get notifications from my book sites – sorry, you’ll get some duplication, but they’ll be hot off the press at the book sites. It makes sense to me that all my writing efforts end up in one place, i.e. here.  It also means that flying and astronomy posts can get onto those other websites and still be seen here. It’s just easier on content management!

Reflections on my visiting

This was a dire result.  I started out well enough, but I never made much headway down the sign-up list, even though I had it open in my browser all month.  I think I got down to about number fifty in the first week, and never returned.  Thank you very much to all my commenters for visiting and commenting on my blog, often before I’d visited you. I did get back to you all, some more than once! I also visited the first thirty or so in my Pinterest list, but most were not doing it and some no longer blogging.

The trouble with only visiting your visitors, is that it does not give you the spawning effect that going down the main list does, where you visit, find others commenting, visit them, which leads to others visiting you, who you visit back, etc.  In fact, the whole overwhelming nature of social media kicks in and it becomes too hard to handle.

That suggests to me that I really have started to suffer from social media burn-out.

Reflections on April

I’ve been busy, again.  As I mentioned in last week’s IWSG post, in answer to whether spring induces the writing spirit, the answer is simply I am too busy and have too much on in April. For the past four years or more I have let my home and especially the garden suffer for my blogging and writing.  This year they had to take centre stage.  Maybe the time really has come for me to rethink my strategies, and stop trying to do everything, and failing to do anything really well.

And in case you ask, Rebecca… VS2 is in exactly the same stage of editing that it was at April 1st, so something has to stop.  I fear it has to be the A to Z. Maybe next year I’ll do what I said I’d do this year, and do my usual blog posts with the letter of the day, and give up trying to do it ‘properly’.

What about you?  How did you get on?  Leave a link to your reflections post in the comments, to make it easier for me to find you!