Blaugust 2024 Retrospective
Holy smokes, I’ve done it! This is post #31/31 for Blaugust 2024. While it’s not my first time writing at least one post for every day of the month, this kind of volume/consistency is pretty rare for my blog.
As I wrote in my halfway point check-in post, the first few weeks went pretty smoothly. I found the time and motivation to sit down and write out a full blog post every evening. Ideas came easily and the words flowed out of my fingertips. And then, having properly jinxed myself by saying it was going well, the second half of the month kind of fell apart for my daily posting habit. Anyone following me on social media will have noticed that the last final 9 or 10 posts were published over the last two days. 😳
I feel justified in blaming some of that intermittence on a crazy work schedule the last two weeks. I’ve been out guiding nearly every day with many long hiking days and climbing trips. It’s been great working full-time (overtime?) as a guide, but it also left me exhausted. Coupled with an illness that I didn’t have the recovery time to shake, I came home most evenings with only enough energy to eat dinner, repack my bag for the next day, and then drag myself up to bed. I tried to keep up with my 7 Things and “Crashing Clockwise” series at least, but other creative writing took a backseat.
Finally, the last few days I had some time in the evenings to dedicate back to blogging. It meant sacrificing other fun activities (I haven’t been to our local Thursday night live concert series in weeks!), but I was committed to finishing this blogging challenge. 31 posts in 31 days (not necessary one per day 😉).
While Blaugust didn’t have the same fervor or participation that I saw from WeblogPoMo2024 back in May of this year, it was just the motivation I needed to get back from my “summer break” off of blogging. As they say, the best way to start writing is to just start writing. One word follows another, and soon enough you’ve filled a sentence, a paragraph, a blog post.
Publishing every day has also helped me to get more comfortable with not agonizing over every detail of the post. I didn’t add as many screenshots of photos as I typically do. I intentionally wrote with more of my speaking voice, rather than the more perfect grammar that I tend towards. Sometimes posts didn’t even get a pass through Grammarly before publishing. [gasp!] And all of that was okay — good even. While I don’t necessarily subscribe to the idea that quantity beats quality, I do think that posting more often is better for me than hardly at all, which is what May through July was like here on HeyDingus.
One regret I have about this month is that I didn’t find the time to flip over the new design I’ve been working on for the site. I thought it would be nice to introduce it for Blaugust where presumably more people would stop by to see it. But that’s okay, that’s time that went toward writing instead.
To finish things off, here’s a short list of my favorite things I wrote this month. Check ’em out if you haven’t already, and if you like what you read you’re welcome to check out the whole Blaugust archive. Thanks for reading.
You (And I) Can Do Hard Things
Uninvited Guest (Or, The Black Bear Snack Bar)
An Incomplete Recounting of My Day
Small Life Improvement: Turn Off Your Microwave
Back to Ohio and Wedding Bound!
This is post #31/31 for Blaugust 2024.