Reflections
A to Z Challenge 2016

This year, I participated for the 2nd time in the A to Z Challenge. Some letters were tough, for others the word I wrote about appeared in my head days, or even weeks before I wrote the post in question.

Last year I had thought that for this year’s challenge I would be well prepared in advance to have plenty of time to visit blogs and write comments. But very quickly after last year’s challenge ended many things in my life changed and planning a long time ahead was not really an option anymore. So when it was time to reveal my theme I opted for authenticity. I also imposed myself the rule to write in alphabetical order and not in zigzag, that I would write about the word for the letter that would come into my head and not try to find one that would please my readers.

Being 100% authentic and spontaneous for one whole month on this blog has helped me find back to my writing voice, grow as a person and gain more confidence.

In the first few days of then challenge I clicked many of the links on the signup list (when on my computer), I also followed many tweets (mostly on my phone) and eventually I used mostly my phone for reading and when that happened I mostly used be “A to Z Challenge” tag in the reader, meaning that in the end I read mostly WordPress blogs. I did read/follow some non-Wordpress blogs, but they must have been in the minority. I discovered many bloggers and on one blog, in particular, I was impatiently waiting for the next instalment of the challenge, it was the blog Introvert Playground.

And the numbers for April, I do recall that last year many bloggers did include the stats, full stats will be posted at the end of the quarter. This April I passed the 400 WordPress followers (I tend to not focus much on follower numbers), last year at the end of the challenge I did not even have 100 followers. In terms of views, it was the 2nd best so far, just 16 views behind December. It was also the 2nd time that I had more than 2000 views in a month. Up to now my blog had never had as many unique visitors for a single month. I passed the 250 post mark in April and published a total of 33 posts.

Finally here is the list of all my A to Z posts of this year.

A to Z challenge Theme Reveal
Authentic
Book
Collection
Dolphin
Energy
Fire
Goals
Help
Invest
Job
Kraków
Learn
Mmm
Nine
Orange
Permission
Quest
Rainbow
Secret
Teaching
Unique
V
Waiting
Xavier
You
Zoned-Out

I’ll be back next April! Maybe prepared, maybe not. But, until then happy reading, writing, connecting and commenting!

How did the challenge go for you? Did you participate?

© Solveig Werner 2016. All rights reserved.