Goodbye to All That A to Z Angst

So that was the A to Z Challenge. It's all over for another year and with it those nights of hastily completing a post before midnight. I'm not sure why we do the A to Z Challenge. Maybe we just do it because it's become an institution like that other April institution, taxes. OK it's more fun than taxes but most things are apart from French kissing a camel.

That old apple badge - so passe - embrace your inner snake

This year I experienced very little A to Z angst due to the fact I wrote all of my posts in advance. There were a couple of chapters where I realized I had lost parts of a document and had to hastily revise but I didn't sweat the challenge much.

Nor did I hop as many blog as I would have liked or get as many diehard followers as I have picked up in previous year. Some of them followed me on this exhausting blogging road before finally fading away like the spectral ghost on the last days of Shackleton's trek who faded in and out of the snow.

If I am to be honest some of the blogs I found along the way left me as cold as the explorers on that nightmare ordeal across the ice. They left me asking why. I wonder now if blogging has lost some of the novelty it seemed to have five years ago or maybe I'm jaded and disconnected. I've seen a lot of good bloggers disappear along the way but this is probably symptomatic of life, friends, lovers and all of the rest.

Maybe because I spend so much of my day in the blogisphere I don't get out enough to choose life. Or maybe life changed imperceptibly over the last few years and became bloodless, our pulse replaced with a Tweet or an invitation to wish someone we barely know happy birthday on LinkedIn.

I'm not going to blame the challenge, though. My blog views were shrinking as fast as Bruce Jenner's man parts before this challenge. Now I am celebrating a very big spike. Call me fickle but there's such as thing as blog hit high.

Of course, like many people out there I have had invasive thoughts about not doing the A to Z Challenge again but the one year I sat it out it felt a bit like being in solitary confinement while the cool kids got to play on the adventure playground. I'll be back next year but I don't want to just go through the motions. It will be spectacular - no more A for apple right.