There's Always a Starting Post

Well, August is upon us.

My younger two kids go back to college in a few weeks, Gen Con Indy 2022 is this week, and I presume the prepatch for Wrath Classic will pop into existence in a few weeks as well.

Oh, and there's this thing called Blaugust, hatched and promoted by Belghast of Tales of the Aggronaut.*

The overall idea is to get people blogging --and excited about blogging-- by having a friendly sort of competition throughout the month of August. You get awards for how many posts you make in a month, all the way up to a top award for a post a day. There's also a Discord involved to both promote Blaugust and provide encouragement and whatnot.

Back in 2020, at the height --or what we thought was the height-- of the pandemic, Belghast promoted Blapril, which I did participate in. (Sorta.) I got 18 posts in over a 30 day month, which wasn't too shabby, but I really felt burned out and grumpy by the end of it. My focus --and my goal-- was on getting more than 15 posts, and I succeeded, but the stress involved coupled with the pandemic proved to be a bit much for me.

So why am I writing about Blaugust now?

Because I'm an idiot with a short memory.

I swear, you're like my inner critic
come to life. Wait... Why are you wearing
that Necro-Knight's Garb? No, don't answer that.

***

Okay, it's not that bad, but I think that I'm going to make a play once more at Blaugust.

But.

I'm doing it on my terms.

And that means the moment I start getting stressed out about posting, it's over. Finit.

That's because I could effectively cheat and create a post per day with a single screenshot in it and schedule them to show up automatically on PC, and... voila!! I reached my goal.

It's technically not cheating if it's a post per day, especially if I have a single witticism along with the screenshot. 

But to me it would be, so I tend to just post as usual, just faster. A LOT faster.

That's where the stress comes in.

***

You'd figure that having been a blogger for almost 13 years the posts would come easier. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. Sometimes real life intervenes, such as 2017 where my output noticeably dipped. That was the year my oldest graduated from high school, and my father died.

So yeah, stuff happened.

You also can get writer's block, which is where I'm at on Cardwyn's adventures after she arrived at Northshire Abbey to take up the life of a Mage. Oh, I've written plenty along the storyline that leads into the Deadmines and Van Cleef, but that initial burst of story after she arrives, well.... That's where I'm stuck. And I've been stuck there for.... geez.... over a year now. 

Hence the other quick stories here and there, and even the Letters From posts are a way to keep me writing fiction without staring at the screen, wondering how to write out that second Cardwyn story.

And it's important to just write something, which isn't exactly hard to do given how TBC Classic ended up for myself, my questing buddy, and even Shintar on her blog. Ironically enough, I've had to rein myself in a bit, so I don't post what I really think about how things went down and end up burning bridges. Which is always an important thing to note: blogging does carry inherent risks, as it's a public endeavor.** You have to be careful what you say, because eventually it will get thrown in your face. It's not a matter of if, but when.

So I've moderated my output a bit this past year plus so as to not do something stupid.

***

If I am going to do Blaugust, shouldn't I be signing up for it?

No.

I mean, you have been reading PC for a while, haven't you?

I figured that if you have, you wouldn't even bother asking why I'm not signing up. For a guy who's been blogging for as long as I have, I'm a pretty private person. I don't wave a flag and toot my own horn, and I don't get on Twitter to promote PC at all. There are only a handful of people in Classic who knew that I was a blogger, and I'm pretty sure that most of them probably forgot in the 1-2 years since I mentioned it to them. 

So I'm not doing this to promote the blog. I'm not doing it for glory or something. I'm not doing it for the respect of my peers, because if I've not earned it by now Blaugust isn't going to change that one whit.

I'm doing it because.... Well, because it's something to do.

A challenge. 

Can I do Blaugust, post a lot, and not stress myself out? I know I'm not going to be around to post every day, so I'm not going to meet that goal, but posting every other day? Sure, I'd like to see if I can do that. 

So here's hoping that I won't get a week in and say "Okay, that's all for me, thanks."

Give it a rest, Card.

#Blaugust2022

*Yes, I would put his blog into the links, but for some reason Blogger refuses to find a feed to work with. So take any complaints up with Google.

**Unless you want to make the blog private, in which case, what's the point? I suppose you could write for writing's sake, but blogging is by design a public endeavor, even if bloggers rarely get a lot of traffic compared to TikTok, Twitter, Twitch, and other more "modern" social media apps.

EtA: Corrected a grammatical error.