A-Z Reflections

So… my reflections about my first experience of the A-Z Challenge which took place during the month of April…

I chose a theme of wildlife encounters because I was confident that I had seen enough animals in the wild that I could come up with something for each letter of the alphabet. The hardest part was finding appropriate photos in my archives, and this meant that some animals I’d have liked to include were discounted altogether. 

From V is for Vulture post

As it was, some of my animal photos weren’t too good. 

From K is for Komodo Dragon post

But I think that was mitigated by the fact that others were magazine quality (and indeed quite a few have been published alongside my travel and/or dive articles).

From Y is for Yellow Boxfish post

I started writing the posts ahead of the challenge and managed to keep ahead of the game. By having a number of posts pre-written, I was able to write up the rest over the month in a reasonably relaxed fashion.

What I didn’t find relaxing was keeping up with my visits and comments on other blogs. Whilst it was a brilliant experience to find new fabulous blogs and meet and banter with new people, it was also sometimes frustrating and time consuming with others.
There were ones who had signed up, but then not even started the challenge and ones where I had to click on several links to actually reach the current post. There was even one that required me to sign in with my name, e-mail and web address every single time in order to leave a comment! Others wrote very long posts which discouraged me from following them. Others didn’t have the courtesy to visit my blog and leave at least one comment after I’d visited and commented on theirs.

Once I discovered how to leave a blog signature to guide people back to my blog I used it on every comment I left and I was most grateful to the bloggers who did the same thing. It made visiting their blogs very slick – and it would be a great idea if the organisers could make this information much clearer and accessible.

Over the last week I have re-visited the blogs I was following during the challenge and quite a few still had their Z post up. I’m also a little dismayed at how swiftly the visits and comments to my blog ceased.

Will I do it again next year? It’s a lot of time, energy (and material) to expend over a month to find blogs containing content that's of interest to me - and to try to gain followers to my own blog. So I don’t know yet… but this experience was exhilarating, fun, exciting, exasperating, and - well - quite a challenge!