April 2015 A-Z Challenge-Reflections

This year was my second attempt at the April A-Z challenge and I am very happy that both the times I was able to successfully complete them. In 2014, when I took part in the challenge, I didn’t have a clue and I just wrote random posts. When visiting other blogs and commenting, I learned a lot. And after completing the challenge last year I decided that in 2015, if I was to participate, I would write a serial story.

So early in Feb 2015, I decided that I’d take part in the challenge and I had a story in mind. But I was not sure how to incorporate it into the A-Z challenge. After a lot of deliberation, I decided that I’d go with Idioms. The reason being simple- there were a lot of idioms to choose from and I made sure that I had idioms for the difficult alphabets J

But unlike last year, I didn’t schedule my posts. I sacrificed my afternoon sleep everyday for writing the next day’s posts and to visit other blogs and comment. J

Initially I was skeptical about the reaction to my short story because it was romantic/thriller and I highly doubted my skills to write a romance saga. But when I received encouraging support from my blogger friends, I felt my spirits soar and I couldn’t wait to reveal the big twist. I had to show tremendous self-control when my readers posted questions related to the big suspense.

And encouraged by the comments, I have decided to collate all the chapters, polish it some more and publish the story as an e-book in the next month. I’m very grateful to all my readers who left such motivating comments and inspired me to write my best.

The drawback of not scheduling posts was I could not do as much of blog hopping like last year, but I tried to frequent my regular blogs to follow their posts. And I made new friends. If there is any regret it is only that I couldn’t visit more blogs. Well, there is always the next year. Here are some of my favorite blogs that I haunted this year J

Swathi Shenoy, Janaki Nagraj, Sundari Venkatraman, The Little Princess, Suzy Que, Vinay, Shantala Nayak, Sanch Vee, Parul, Aathira Jim, Sheethal, Shalini, 

Rajlakshmi, Devika Fernando, Preethi Venugopal, Shilpa Garg, Shailaja, Archana, 

Eloquent Mind

I’m really sorry if I have missed out on listing other blogs that I read but I have  a pathetic memory. I have enjoyed reading each and every blog that I visited the last month and it was wonderful April for me.

And very late in the challenge I came across another fascinating blog from Mithila Menezes and I was sorry that I couldn’t read her posts from the beginning. She was blogging with a "Harry Potter and Hogwarts" theme and her posts were really fabulous. I hope to catch up on my reading this month.

See you again next year, with 26 posts and hopefully another serial story.

A proud 2nd time survivor