REFLECTIONS - A TO Z BLOGGING CHALLENGE 2018

The month-long A to Z Blogging Challenge 2018 is finally over. And what a month it has been! It's been a month of sleepless nights, eerie thoughts, imagination running wild, and yeah, even numb nothingness. But hey, the feeling of great satisfaction after successfully completing the challenge far exceeds any other emotion. 

Last year had been mentally draining as well, largely because of my starting out pretty late. In fact, last year, I actually finished the challenge about 15 days late. This year though, I consciously made an effort to start out early, and managed to prepare drafts for about eight posts way before the challenge actually started. I think I was able to complete the challenge on time only due to this reason.

At the risk of coming across as boastful, I must honestly tell you this - for someone with a full-time job, sitting down to write after getting back home from work is no mean feat. This is how my routine was for pretty much all of April - I would wake up at around 7 am, read and leave comments on about 6-8 posts of fellow-bloggers, leave for work by 9 am, come back home by 9 pm, have my dinner and sit down to write at 10 pm. Since most of my write-ups were unplanned, I usually had to stay up till 1 or 2 am to finish my posts.

Needless to say, I managed to stay motivated because of the help and support of many people:-

My Wife -  My wife is the person I need to thank first and foremost. It's not easy for someone to patiently do all the work at home single-handedly, while her spouse spent all of his time staring into a laptop like a zombie. My wife has been amongst the greatest admirers of my writing, and for that I feel blessed.

Fellow bloggers - Not many things manage to keep you more motivated than peer pressure, and my fellow-bloggers did their job very well. When you see your fellow-bloggers taking pains to put up their posts in time, you instinctively tend to push yourself to put in that extra bit of effort yourself. I would like to thank:-

Ashwini - for helping me with ideas for posts, for constantly motivating me and for being very generous with her comments

Anagha Yatin - for religiously visiting my blog and providing postive reinforcement through her comments

Suchita Agarwal - for her thrilling (and insanely funny) detective story

Smsaves - for her wonderful, wonderful poems and stories - she has earned herself a fan for life! 

Anami, Deepa Karthik, Dipika Singh, Deepa Gandhi, Disha Khanna and Akshata Ram for pushing me to go on with their wonderful and highly engaging write-ups, and for making an effort to read my sometimes insane posts ;)

All those Instagrammers who allowed me to use their images with my write-ups. 

And finally, I would like to thank BlogChatter for championing the A to Z Challenge and thereby providing bloggers a great platform to showcase their creativity.

Cheers,

CRD