Monday 7 May 2012

The A to Z reflections post

So I've survived my second year of A to Z (barely).

Last year I managed to write something in between a short story and a novellete (what's an average of 500 words x 24 posts called? lol) through out A to Z and this year, the vote went to flash fiction. Well, it started off at flash fiction anyway, and degenerated into vignettes as the word count dropped from an average of 500 - 600 words down to about 200 words. Hah. Let's blame late working nights for that.

Same went for my blog-hopping intentions. At the beginning of the challenge, I would visit commenters, leave comments and visit a few extra people picked randomly off the list. As April progressed, this degenerated into a short stop-by to visit those who commented. I guess I will be using part of May to still do some stop bys, assuming May isn't as crazy as April has been.

Time has always been an issue for me in blogging, so I suppose if I'm going to survive A to Z again, I will probably have to pre-write a lot of stuff (or resign from my job! haha). I actually started off prewriting about 3 posts ahead, but that got gradually cut down because there were some days I got home too late and zombified to think. And there were some posts that I just stared at for ages because I couldn't think of how to write it. Although I had a game plan of 26 words, I did change some as and when I had sudden *bursts* of inspiration.

By far my favourite posts to write were the Gyroscope/Hysterical posts (which I'm editing into a 10-minute play for Short + Sweet) and Ivy. Nymphomania grew rather organically out of Ivy, whilst Gyroscope & Hysterical were a spin off from a trend of though from Fuzzy. Funnily enough, these are the top-read posts as well (data for the month)

I guess it's back to my normal routine.

Check out this space tomorrow for M. Pax's book launch!

10 comments:

  1. Hi, Anna,

    Your April sounds exactly like mine. If I am in a position to do the challenge in 2013, I must have a better plan of attack. :)

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    1. Glad to know I'm not the only one.
      We could always start writing posts now.... ;)

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  2. I did a lot more this April than last year.

    Survived with two blogs, but only visited about 700 or so blogs. Wanted to do 1000. Maybe I'll visit the whole list now, but I still need to find the time. :-)

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    1. WOW!
      Two blogs AND visited 700 or so?
      That's not an "only" Misha... it's incredible.

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  3. I really enjoyed your vignettes.

    I sort of cheated by only posting every other day.

    Wow, to Misha. Puts my 450 visited to shame.

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    1. Thanks Mary.

      I didn't even track the sites I visited... I don't think it was more than 100 :(

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  4. Lot of interesting blogs out there this time. I couldn't read them all but lord knows there were days I was 3 hrs reading blogs.

    I did a lot of random picks too, on top of reading my normal blog roll.

    Google is messing with quite a few of us Anna, with suspicious activity flags. Horrible and scary even when you know your site is clean even when google says your site is clean yet the flag remains. Gah!

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    1. Hey Sia!
      Google was crazy. It totally locked me out of my e-mail AND took the blog down. =/

      Glad it's sorted out.

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  5. Wow! 263 pageviews...I think my highest day according to Blogger was 11. Eeek.... ;-)

    But we survived, we wrote flash fiction and some of it was good. We gained new friends and found new blogs to follow. What more can we ask for?

    Going to enjoy following your blog...

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    1. Thanks Donna. Yea, it has overall been a good month. :)
      Gonna enjoy following your blog too!

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