I’ve just heard about a phenomenon that’s been happening for at least a dozen years, called Blaugust. In short, it’s an annual celebration of blogs, of website owners posting their opinions, takes, reviews, etc., of anything and everything of interest to them. Like the section of this very website you’re reading at this moment, where I indulge in sharing my views on… let’s face it… pretty much anything.
The self-imposed challenge in Blaugust (blog + August, get it?) is to ideally post a new blog every day of that month, or at least as often as you can, and probably far more often than you normally do, all in order to promote end encourage more blogging as a whole. And as a result, to also prove to yourself that you can and should do it more than you do (*ahem*). There’s also an added element to it, this year in particular, of wanting to promote — nay, celebrate — humans creating written content more than A.I. increasingly writing content, which I applaud.
It seems that Blaugust is made to be a blogging community building effort, as well, so through that link anyone who cares to sign up to blog (way) more often is also encouraged to mingle with others doing the same thing. You’ll be invited into forums to schmooze and share with other bloggers from around the world, who you almost certainly don’t know and have never heard of, but who can all enjoy the (virtual) company of others who enjoy the process of blogging.
Even beyond the discussion forums, the folks at Nerd Girl Thoughts are encouraging participants to not just write on their own blogs, but to cross-pollinate among other blogs, as well. There’s a nominal (honorary) point system for Blaugust participants, where you get credit for levels of posting you write for yourself, but then added points for other things including hosting the posts of other bloggers, which as often as not leads to them hosting a post you’ve written. This can of course lead to new personal connections and generate new followers for your own website, which is never a bad thing.
It all seems to be a very upbeat and positive, and it struck me right away as a really intriguing idea.
Having said that, I’m really leaning toward it, but I’m not totally sold on participating. Once again, questions keep into my head along the lines of, “If you can take the time to write a blog daily, you can take the time to write daily. And you don’t. And you won’t get better as a writer unless you write more often, even if not daily. Priorities, m’man.”
But to that inner critic, I’d say that while no, I don’t write as often as I should, Blaugust sounds like fun. And my life — let’s face it, probably everyone’s life — could do with more fun. I wrote four years ago (good lord, time flies) that I wanted to write shorter blog entries more often than the less frequent but lengthier posts that tend to dominate my website.
Well, clearly that didn’t happen.
But I still like the idea of shooting for it. Maybe Blaugust, with it necessarily requiring shorter content posted more often, will help instill that habit in me. It’ll force me way outside my comfort zone — as my best friend recently reminded me I, and many people, could benefit from doing more often — and into a whole different place than I’d ever even considered attempting to go.
I already know that what I would shoot for if I participated would be to post at least once every day. Not for the (self-tracked) points, and not for the credit (shared, after all, among no bloggers I know), but just for the challenge to myself.
Increasing the chances that such is even doable is the fact that I recently discovered that WordPress, the platform I’ve built this website on, has a mobile app. Last I checked — evidently a number of years back, given the age of some app reviews — WordPress expressly didn’t have an app yet, but the organization said that one was being worked on. Well, it’s here and it works (fun fact: The title and opening line of this post were drafted and saved on this site via my phone, which I then picked up on my laptop and finished off), which hugely increases the chances that I can post something on my site every day, even if I don’t have access to a laptop wherever I may be from day to day. That’s a game changer for posting as a whole, but particularly for something like this.
And there’s further encouragement from real-world examples. Alan Cross, the long-time historian and radio show host of all things music, writes every day on his website.
And the ever-inspiring “writer who draws”, Austin Kleon, has a weekly newsletter in which he links to ten blog posts about ten things he found interesting that week. That’s well more than one post a day, even as prolific as he is. Surely, particularly with advanced planning allowed in Blaugust, I can come up with something — hell, anything — that catches my interest or I want to get off my chest or just noodle on, and I can write about every day.
“Can you, though?”
Shut up, inner critic.
Although honestly, that’s part of what’s got me interested in this challenge, is to see if I can to it in order to help squash that all-too-vocal self-doubt that creeps in too often whenever I consider doing something I haven’t done before. I know the inner critic is often there, felt even by some successful writers who still hear it when they get going on a new novel or screenplay (“Yeah, but what if this time it doesn’t work?”), but I know for myself that it’s silenced a little bit and there’s a small, inner celebration and hit of dopamine in accomplishing something I hadn’t done before, and questioned if I could even do in the first place.
It’s not climbing Everest or anything nearly as grandiose, but it’s a challenge I’m putting to myself — yes, just in the writing of this post, I’ve decided that I’m going to do it — to see if I can. Even if I fall short of posting daily, I know I’ll be posting way more often than I normally do, which is a good thing in and of itself. Win-win.
Blaugust: You’re on.