Reflecting on the A to Z experience

English: Hurdle Suomi: Estejuoksija ja este (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Blogging in a vacuum isn't very much fun. The wave of activity I signed up for by participating in these posts is a like running a marathon, I suppose. {I've never run a marathon, but after running a mile once when I was kid, I bent over and threw up.} I'm not feeling nauseous, I'm feeling a little bit accomplished. This year I did complete the challenge. I did browse the other participants' posts and started new conversations with new people and stirred up new conversations with old friends.

The blogs I follow and link to on the far right column of this blog are a mix of blogs I'm interested in, but also blogs of people I have started to really admire as writers.

These bursts of content, whether relevant or not, are the hurdles in the race. This year we had 1000+ people sign up to publish one post per day having something to do with a letter of the alphabet. A little trite, but as a club activity, it's a lot like a team building activity. At work, I was once asked to teach someone to juggle three balls. I didn't have any juggling experience, but I had to do it anyway. I learned to communicate and give directions even though I wasn't sure of the subject matter. I had been given all the details and tricks I needed. With practice my partner started to get the hang of it.

This exercise is very much like that situation. As we all scrambled to come up with ideas, some people dropped balls, fell over the hurdles, or out right threw up all over the track. {What-ever, you get the picture.}

We were also asked to visit the people who commented on our posts and look around at the other runners while we ran. I did try to CONTROL CLICK on the names and blog links to open their posts in new tabs. My strategy was to open several tabs and hunt for new interesting blogs as I prepared my posts and responded to comments. I started focusing on the Educational blogs first. I follow a lot of homeschooling people on Google Plus, but found so many new exciting people running alongside of me.

If you participated with me on this journey, I hope you didn't trip up over any of the flying balls or falling runners.