As of today I have achieved the old school / traditional goal of Blaugust: posting 31 times in the month. My current count across my three blogs, not counting this post, looks like this:
- Ubergeek Kelly’s World: 25 posts
- Words of the AgingGamer: 5 posts
- Geek on a Harley: 1 post
Getting to thirty one posts was definitely not one of my goals for Blaugust festival. I had planned on at least five posts with a focus on the community builder objectives and I believe I’ve achieved both with a good chunk of the month left to go. But accidents sometimes happen, and this month I was able to maintain some time each day to write in my blogs.
Thoughts on completing thirty one posts
I will have a post next week I expect on the things I did and do to remain motivated, but the primary things I focused on to achieve thirty one posts are brevity of writing and taking inspiration from others. Basically: keep it short and steal what isn’t nailed down. I tried to add some notable original thought to everything I posted and think I was reasonably successful, but I know my posts compare unfavourably to some of the more serious writers in the festival.
I regularly found inspirational posts that were a couple thousand words in length then wrote a 400 or 500 word response. Obviously it is clear where the real work there was done, and it wasn’t on my blogs. I stand behind what I’ve written but recognize I took a different approach compared to others who produced large and wholly original artifacts of thought. But I know with a high degree of certainty that I wouldn’t have achieved my post count without drawing most of my inspiration from other Blaugust authors.
Drawing inspiration from other bloggers is encouraged within the Blaugust festival: we give credit to each other in our posts, share ideas in the discord, and have group projects that all spin off blog posts from a common thread. I would not say, however, that I particularly enjoyed this way of writing as my primary motivator. I am pretty certain that this will be the first and last year I achieve thirty one posts for the Blaugust festival or any month for that matter. But I’m glad I have hit the target once and can now rest upon my laurels.
Speaking of the rest of the month, I am now exhausted. I feel like every day has been three or four hours of thinking, organizing, writing, and editing of my blog. My wife has even gotten a little short with me a couple of times as I’ve tried to squeeze in writing between other activities. I have a few posts written for later this week and a couple of ideas for additional posts later in the month, but I’m not sure I will get to them. I might just stall out at around 34 or so total posts for the month, and that feels just fine to me.
The header image for this post is AI generated using ChatGPT
- apparently there are 38 days in the month, and I don’t feel the slightest bit “legendary”, but that’s AI for you
