Blaugust

Today is the very last day of April, and in theory it would normally be the point at which we draw this month long experiment to a close. However due to the weird nature of the times we find ourselves in I changed things up a little bit this year. I am not exactly sure if that many noticed but the time frame of the event and as such the tabulation started March 29th and concludes with May 9th, encompassing the entire six weeks of Blapril. It always felt weird that I specifically outline six weeks of content creation and then only ever counted 31 days of that period towards the ultimate goal of the event. The problem is, now would be the normal time when I start tabulating the results but this means that I ultimately have one more entire week that I will need to include.

It is probably however time to talk a little bit about the proceedings as a whole. We had 46 bloggers sign up to participate in the event, which seems pretty solid given the very impromptu nature of the fact that we moved this up to April. That was made up of eight mentors, thirty two participants and six newbies. So in essence we brought six blogs into the forefront of this community and hopefully got them a bunch of exposure and what will ultimately turn into regular readers. Here is a quick rundown of the participants.

• BeckyBecky – BeckyBecky Blogs
• Belghast – Tales of the Aggronaut
• Bhagpuss – Inventory Full
• Cali – Diary of a Guildleader
• Catofsedum – Green Not-Bananas
• Chestnut – Gamer Girl Confessions
• Discgrace – Daily Creative Thing
• Easha and Poppy – Glittering Girly Gwent Gaming
• Elio – The Path They Walk
• Everwake – Everwake’s Internet Adventures
• Graphiya – Graphiya’s Garden
• Izlain – Me vs Myself and I
• Jen Thorpe – Book of Jen
• Joar – WoW Alt Addiction
• Kanter – MMO One Night a Week
• Kluwes – I’m Not Squishy
• Krikket – Nerd Girl Thoughts
• Lalista – Lalista’s Hub World
• Magen – Magen Tales
• MagiWasTaken – indiecator.home.blog
• Mailvaltar – Mailvaltar – MMOs and other stuff
• MMOJuggler – MMOJuggler
• Naithin – Time to Loot
• Nogamara – Battlestance
• Ocho – Casual Aggro
• Paeroka – Nerdy Bookahs
• Panda Steve – Panda Steve Types Stuff
• Rambling Redshirt – Beyond Tannhauser Gate
• Redbeard – Parallel Context
• Roger Edwards – Contains Moderate Peril
• rumorsmatrix – rumorsmatrix, a blog
• Sandrian – Aeternus Gaming
• SDWeasel – Unidentified Signal Source
• Shadowz – Shadowz Abstract Gaming
• Solarayo – Ace Asunder
• Shintar
  • Going Commando
  • Priest with a Cause
  • Neverwinter Thoughts
• Stargrace – Nomadic Gamers Eh!
• Swiftcast – Swiftcast
• Syp – Bio Break
• Telwyn – GamingSF
• Tessa/Endalia
  •  Narratess
  • Princess in a Castle
• TheRoyalFamily – Dating Sims On the Holodeck
• WelshTroll – WelshTroll
• Wilhelm – TAGN
• Unwiseowl – leaflocker 
• Zappicus – Leeterati

One of the best things to come out of last year, I think was expanding our reach to Facebook… which more or less was a completely different community of users that we were not reaching. Last year Angie from Backlog Crusader introduced the community to Geek Blogs Unite, and this year we had several participants that joined the proceedings from there. I’ve personally been down on Facebook as a whole for years, but it opened my eyes to the fact that there are other thriving communities out there that I personally wasn’t even paying attention to.

I think another significant success has been how actively the Blaugust discord has remained throughout the years between its inception and this current event. It has sorta become a base of operations for a lot of us as we go throughout our separate lives as bloggers. Blogging in as disparate a community as we have will always be a bit like island nations developing trade negotiations with other island nations, since we don’t have a perfect copy of shared experiences. However having a stable platform to communicate and share ideas most certainly helps the isolation, which I guess is an important realization given that so many of us are in very real isolation mode.

Since the topic of this post is about setting expectations, I just want everyone to be aware that the assigning of rewards is going to come a little later this year than it has in other years. Since I specifically used the verbiage “Posts during the weeks outlined for Blapril 2020” that includes all six weeks and I don’t want to jump the gun and push someone out the door that is still working towards whatever goal they ultimately had. My hope as well was by extending it out a bit, it would feel like less of a sprint after which the participant collapses at the finish line, and stops posting for another year. Fatigue has always been a challenge we have dealt with since the very first running of this event.

Yesterday our dear Bhagpuss, who has always been one of my favorite bloggers to read wrote a bit about the exhaustion. It is well worth the read but there is a bit of it that ultimately addresses some of my concerns in doing this each year.

Every time Belghast runs one of these things he takes great care to emphasize that it’s not a competition, that there are no “win” conditions and that the awards are only there for fun. Even so, every time there seem to be quite a few Blaugustians or Blaprilistas who don’t seem to be finding it anything like as much fun as they thought it would be.

Bhagpuss – Inventory Full

To which I allowed myself a moment of despair and commented about my own fears.

I always feel bad when folks seem to struggle a bit. It is this moment when I start to question if I should ever do another event like this again. I am never certain how it is going to end up. I think blaugust as a community has been good, but I am not sure if blaugust as an event really bears the fruit I ultimately hope it will. Those of us who are regular bloggers will stay regular bloggers, but I am not sure if we are really making any new ones from our mold.

Belghast – via Inventory Full

The thing is… this is always a concern that I have when deciding if we are going to do this again. This is also why the format has shifted throughout the years because I keep trying to figure out a way to get the benefit of having a focused month of blogging without getting some of the negative after effects. Blaugust is the herald of fresh content, but unfortunately it is also the warden of months of not posting as the writers recover from the marathon that they just ran. Those of us who are more or less daily bloggers have been doing this for so long that I am not sure what we would do if we were not posting content. However for everyone who has been a once or twice a month blogger, it is a major stretch to try and create so much content in a single event.

That first year was an eye opener, because so many people that managed to get their thirty one days also effectively dropped off the face of the planet. There are times I allow myself to get mired in the notion that I might have killed as many blogs as I have helped create or promote. I appreciate when folks like Naithin come along to give me a kick in the rear when I get to thinking like this, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that what I said isn’t true. I am constantly concerned about the impact I have made with this event, both the positive and the negative. Bhagpuss had some sage advice to follow my own comment.

I tend to get the sense that the pressure, such as it is, comes from the Award system. It’s similar to what you see in games with achievements – with some people, once they know they exist they feel obligated to get them. You couldn’t really have made it any more clear that the awards are just for fun but their mere existence has people setting targets.

Bhagpuss – Inventory Full

So I guess the question is… should we do away with the awards? I am wondering if they are something that is more or less vestigial at this point? Blaugust started its life as a challenge to other bloggers, to do what I had chosen to do and start blogging on a daily basis at least for one month. It was in fact a contest and we even had rewards for winning, which admittedly was mostly me just handing out some duplicate humble bundle codes that I had stockpiled. In an attempt to combat the fatigue I kept trying to open it up and make less things mandatory in an effort to lower the anxiety and stress. However for whatever reason I have kept the rewards as sort of bragging rights for anyone who wanted them.

So I ask you the participants and my readers… are the rewards making things worse? Is it time to abandon them? What changes could I make to Blaugust/Blapril to lower the stress level and reduce the negative impact of the event? What would you change if you could in the way these proceedings work? I guess the other topic we need to discuss is whether or not we want to do anything in August when Blaugust would normally run, and if so what should we do to mark it? My comment section as always is open and so long as it isn’t random pedantry about typos or spelling errors, I always welcome real criticism.

Hey Folks! It’s that time again, time for another Blapril post. Monday I talked about the challenges of figuring out a name, and yesterday was a dive into various free hosting options. This morning I am going to talk about what I consider to be the third most important thing about blogging… making room in your life for writing. Best intentions are exactly that right up until the point you actually set forth with a plan to make them happen. If you are going to be writing more often then you need to figure out when exactly you are going to do this thing. “Whenever I get around to it” generally means that you are going to post any time you have a burning idea and then extremely intermittently in the times in between those moments of genius. This is an extremely relevant message coming from me who has had a wild ride as far as posting regularity goes.

The Grand Experiment

If you look at the early days of this blog you will find that I had no semblance of a schedule. I might post three days in a row and then it could be a month or two until my next post. The problem with this sporadic nature is that you are setting yourself up for frustrations. Firstly your readers won’t know when to expect new content and as a result folks will turn up when they happen to think about it… which is essentially never. If you are waiting for a moment of genius before you put keys to virtual paper, then there is the thought that surely some other more regular site would be talking about it. I would have torrents of readers when something of mine got elevated to Massively or WoW Insider but the rest of the time it was pretty much crickets because I was doing nothing to keep regular readers.

As a point of reference there are 152 posts that occurred during the first four years of my blog or an average of 38 posts per year during 2009-2013. In the time since then I have written 2150 averaging 307 posts a year in the seven years in between. What changed is that on April 26th of 2013 I wrote a post entitled The Grand Experiment, in which I pledged to write something every single day and change the way I interacted with my blog. I had created this false assumption about my blog and blogging in general that every single post had to be important. So to get me over this I just started writing anything that came to my mind every single day and continued this for roughly three and a half years. There were days when it was harder than others but I kept at it and kept pushing forward and making new posts until I became numb to the constant nagging sense of doubt, disillusionment and feelings of complete and total inadequacy.

Making Room for Writing

The only way this ever worked is because I set forth and made space in my life for it to happen. I had gotten into the habit of hanging out each morning upstairs in my office while I drank my morning cup of coffee. During this time I would either fall down a youtube hole or log into whatever my MMORPG of choice at the time was and grind out a few dailies. It was completely frivolous time that could be used for other purposes but I ultimately never did anything with it. I decided that I could sacrifice this hour of time and instead focus on writing a blog post every single morning. Clearing this space in my life for usually uninterrupted writing time gave me the room that I needed to write every single day and honestly I found that this unnatural time boxing actually made me more productive.

I knew that I could not screw around because from the time I planted my butt in my chair at 6 am, that come 7 am I had to publish whatever I managed to cobble together during that time. Often times the actual writing of the post happened from about 6:30 am to 7 am because I would inevitably spend some time trying to “find my muse” for the morning and checking in on what was going on in the world. So not only could I pull a post out of thin air, I could in theory do it in about thirty minutes. The process actually began way earlier than that at 5:30 when I pulled myself out of bed and hopped in the shower. While warm water cascaded over my body waking me up, I would start thinking about what I was going to write that morning. My ENTIRE morning started revolving around what I could do to make sure I met my deadline and got some new piece of content out that morning. One simple act set this all in motion, and that was clearing some space for the writing itself to happen.

Figuring out Your Schedule

Blaugust and Blapril as well is at its core an examination of what it takes to create regularly serialized content. Readers love predictability and I don’t mean predictable themes or topics, but the ability to predict the arrival of new content. If you set a schedule to post on Monday, Wednesday and Friday then your readers will return on those days because they know there is new content to consume. If your schedule is instead whenever you feel like it, then you have given your readers no queues as to how often they should be prepared to receive new content. Sure RSS readers are a way of getting around this but after the death of Google Reader this is less and less of a reliable source of traffic. Most of your readers are coming in either organically through search or arriving deliberately. The later of those is made up through those hitting your site directly or from your various syndication efforts on social media (which is why I stressed the importance of camping those names on various platforms in day one).

Blaugust was never about trying to get people to adopt the nonsense rigor that I kept for three years of posting every single day. Instead it was an attempt to show them that after having posted every single day in a month that they could easily maintain a more rational schedule of every week day, every other day or something similar. It was a celebration of being able to do something really hard which in turn made doing something less difficult seem easier. However I am not really sure if this has ever worked quite in the way I wanted it to. All of that aside the best way to build a regularly community of readers is to post your content on a reliable and predictable schedule. There are folks that have been concerned about me in the few cases when I didn’t get a post out before 8 am, because most days you could almost set your watch based on when I was going to publish content.

Give Yourself Room to Fail

Ultimately I backed off of the posting every single day thing because it seemed extremely oppressive to never let the ball touch the ground. Like I said some days were extremely easy, and the content flowed through my fingertips into the keyboard like someone else was writing it. There were other days when everything went wrong and I felt a growing sense of dread as the clock ticked closer and closer to seven and I still didn’t have anything workable. Those are the days now when I post a quick note to twitter and apologize that there won’t be a post that day and the move on with my life. I have given myself permission to fail and then dust myself off the next morning and keep going like nothing happened.

In the early days of the blog it felt like each time I had a major absence, that I needed to come up with some great post as a way of saying sorry to the people who were still reading me. Either that or I felt like I needed to write a treatise on what exactly happened that kept me from actually churning out content. When you are posting regularly it becomes easier to just note that new content won’t be coming and move on with whatever real world tragedy has kept you from dedicating the time needed that day. Your readers are also more forgiving because they know this single lapse is the exception rather than the rule and they know they will be able to expect fresh content the next day. You have to find the rhythm of content creation that fits the pace of your life and when you do… after a few months you will find it becomes second nature.

Blogging as Therapy

One last bit that I am going to talk about this morning is something I have hinted at before. On most days it feels like I am sitting down and writing to an empty room. I occasionally am shocked when someone reaches out to me that they read something I wrote, or when one of my posts gets picked up by another website. The secret of my blog is that I am doing this as much for my benefit as I am for yours. Sitting down and dumping my thoughts to the digital page each morning is in many ways a form of therapy as I order my thoughts and arrange them into a neat little pile that forms a paragraph. I appreciate that you the reader exists as part of this, because it gives me a reason to keep doing this. However if tomorrow I decided to stop blogging entirely, I would probably turn around and start a private journal to fill this apparently needed role in my life.

There are going to be people who arrive on your doorstep because of some grand content that you created. There are going to be people who arrive because they happen to love whatever it is that you are into at a time. However if someone stays with you for years, or in my case over a decade… they are going to do so because they are interested in you as a human being. When you transition to that phase in your blog you have a lot of freedom to talk about whatever happens to be bothering you regardless if it happens to fit neatly into your theme. I’ve always tried to be open to my readers and share a lot of my life with them, albeit often times anonymized to protect friends and family. I want to be fundamentally honest and in that honesty comes expected truth that spills out between the cracks. There are times when I am working through a thought process and come to some fundamental realization about myself that I had never landed upon before. So if you allow it your blog can operate on levels that your readers may never quite glean, but can at the same time help you immensely.