May 7, 2012 / amivglobus

A to Z Summary and Reflection

So, I did the A to Z Challenge in April. I chose The Beatles for my theme. Scroll to the bottom of this post for a list of links.

I like the theme that I chose. I know a lot about The Beatles, but I learned a few things along the way too. And every post has a link to a song, so there’s great music all the way through. I’ve done themed posts before {on a different blog} but never one with this many posts. I’m sure I’ll do themed posts again. Will I do the A to Z Challenge again? Probably not.

It took a lot of time. I knew I couldn’t be online every day. Scheduling posts ahead of time let me keep my entries up-to-date, but I was unable to get around to reading posts by other people nearly as much as I had hoped to. I made sure I visited every person that left a comment for me. I am following a few new blogs now, but according to my site stats I didn’t pick up any new followers. {Some might, of course, continue to visit without signing on as a follower. We’ll see.} That’s a little disappointing. On the other hand, music-related posts are usually a fraction of my posts, so the April challenge probably doesn’t adequately represent what new followers may find here in the next few months. And I suspect that will be true of the content of the blogs I have started following — it’s going to be different from April, and I may or may not continue to follow.

I wish that the list of participants included whether the participant was using a theme and what that theme was. I think I might have found more blogs that had content I was interested in. And I wish there were some way to cull people from the list who signed up, but didn’t keep up. Or maybe a way to preview what their most recent post was. By the third week, it seemed like half the links I explored were not up-to-date, and some hadn’t been since the first week.

In all, it was an interesting challenge and I’m glad I tried it. For me this was a successful challenge as a writer because I wrote a post {and stayed on theme} for every one of the 26 days. I may have had unreasonable expectations about the number of new blogs I would find to follow and how many new followers I could pick up though. Maybe it was naive to expect that at all. Maybe I should have looked at it simply as a one-shot deal, but I have zero interest in trying to visit all the blogs in the challenge just so I can say I did.

Here’s a list of my posts from April. Almost all of the posts are titles of Beatles songs. There are some letters that start a lot of titles and it was difficult to choose just one. There were some letters for which there are no Beatles songs that begin with that letter. {I can’t seem to come up with a less clunky way to phrase that.} In those cases I mostly resorted to songs from the members’ solo careers, or songs where the letter of the day is not the first letter of the title, but a prominent word nonetheless. The exceptions to using titles are K and Q; for those I used the names of a sound-alike band {Klaatu} that was rumored to be the Beatles and an earlier band {The Quarrymen} that included John, Paul, and George which was later renamed The Beatles.