The A to Z Challenge or the April month of madness as I usually think of it, has been a little less mad for me this year – I had about 12 posts ready ahead of time and managed to stay ahead until the letter X when I pantsed it but also wrote Y and Z ahead of the last days – a sprint to the finish!
I wrote about 16,600 words up to today, not including comments both replying to those who kindly visited, and I try never to leave any comment un-replied to! But then there are the visits back which sometimes elicited quite long comments on my part – because I hate just visiting back as an excuse to leave my blog post link – and in any case there were some very interesting posts that richly deserved a fulsome comment!
But what really marks my experience of each and every year of my four years of participating in the challenge, is the friends that either re-connect or, in the case of this year, the entirely new group of friends that have returned regularly throughout the month. Perhaps the nature of my theme attracts different people, perhaps the posts by those visiting, elicited more visits from me. The WordPress App was replaced by Jetpack and I soon found myself subscribed to a list of bloggers who participate in multiple challenges simultaneously and so, as well as the A to Z posts, I found my notifications full of poems, photographs and excitingly, some AI generated images. There is so much talk at present about AI that I have decided to try and keep the momentum of blog posting going, with a personal evaluative exploration of AI for both text and image creation at the end of which I hope to be able to express an informed opinion about whether we are likely to be under the thumb of AI or released from tedious labours…
I will be reviewing some of the wonderful bloggers I have met this year in my Roadtrip reviews so I hope you will stop by for that – I don’t know about you, but there is nobody whose every post I managed to visit and definitely some I want to fill in the gaps with!
As to my own writing experience, the posts certainly developed a life of their own, demanding much more research and crafting than I imagined as I built a list of possible phrases. But that work seemed to have pleased judging by the latter day comments which makes it worthwhile. There were only two posts that received no comments and one of those “X” manages to illustrate a Roman pagan festival with a pop video from Meghan Traynor of which I am quite proud, so if you missed it… Admittedly, by X and Y, I think everyone is suffering a little blog-fatigue!
There was also the great article from Wikipedia on Cant Languages from which all about four letters were furnished with languages…
Did I have a favourite – well I could only narrow it down to four – M, N, Q and R…
So there we are and Roadtrip here we come…
A – The Apple of my Eye, Academic – Contranyms…
B – The Bitter End, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, Brass monkeys, Butcher’s Bill, – Sailors’ terms
C – Cockney, Cant, Chip on your shoulder, Codswallop – Just weird…
D – In Deep Water (Out of your Depth), Dead in the water, Doozy!
Early Hours – flowers, Early Doors, and The Elephant in the Room…
H – He hath eaten me out of house and home – Shakespeare…
I – In the doldrums, Idler, In the Offing.
K – Kick the Bucket, bucket list, Know the ropes…
M – Mad as a Hatter, – Job related
O – Offshore (rules are out of jurisdiction)
P – Pony Up, Pipe Dreams, Pig in a Poke and Letting the Cat out of the Bag.
Q – Queen of Hearts – Quisling – Figures from History – Eponyms…
R – Robot – robota – Czech for forced labour – “Foreign” words appropriated – Rule of Thumb…
T – Three Sheets to the Wind, Truffle out, Tarnation, Tits up – break a leg. On Tenterhooks…
U – Under the Weather, – Upper case / Lower case, – Umble pie…
W – Wednesday, Friday etc.- Linguistic hangovers – Walk the Chalk, Winging it –Whistlestop Tour…
Xmas Tree, Extras, EXpelliarmus – Made up languages…
Z – Zounds –Bloody – Gor Blimey – Lordy – Abbreviations for religious purposes…