Challenges

Today’s assignment seems quite good.  Pick a community event or challenge and get involved.  There are a wide range of challenges, from photography to fiction writing to general blogging challenges that use prompts to encourage you to post regularly – every day, week, whatever.

This serves two purposes.  Getting involved in the wider WordPress community, to both gain new readers and find interesting blogs you might otherwise miss, particularly the parts which share interests with you.  It also keeps you blogging.  On the days where nothing really of note has happened, or maybe it has happened before and you’d just be retreading the same ground, or you’re unsure just how to get something written down that people will want to read.  Challenges step in at this point to give you a direction or a push in way you maybe hadn’t considered.  And if you pick the right challenges to get involved in this won’t feel like a chore or alien to your blog.

I cheated and picked three challenges for this assignment.  The first is the Around the World Reading Challenge, hosted by Booking It.  I chose this for a few reasons.  First, it is a fairly low impact challenge.  Six books in a year isn’t a lot.  I could do that in a month; less if I pushed myself.  I won’t; I want to give myself time to properly digest the books for this challenge, and blog about each one before I move on to the next.  The second thing is the big draw for me.  Each book should be from an author from a different continent.  This is really the only restriction on the challenge (fiction, non-fiction, genre – none of these matter) but it gives me an impetus to branch out from some of the authors and genres I tend to fall back on, read a couple of books that have been on my To Read list for a while, and from time to time write about something a little different on this blog.

The second challenge took a bit more consideration.  I knew I wanted something much more frequent and regular.  Weekly, maybe even daily if the challenge itself didn’t take up too much time.  I wanted to try either one of the many flash fiction challenges, or possibly one of the photography challenges.  The first I think I could be pretty good at, the second less so but I’d be willing to try and it would help stretch the content on the blog.  There were quite a few options for both, and in the end I went with one of each.

The Phoneography and Non-SLR Digital Devices Photo Challenge hosted by Lens and Pens by Sally looks interesting, with a focus on using phone and other non-professional cameras to take pictures – something ideal as I haven’t had an SLR for years, but I do have a phone with a camera.

I’m also going to participate in Mondays Finish the Story, where a photo and the opening line of a story are posted and the challenge is to finish it in 100-150 words.

These should all let me stretch my writing and blogging muscles, and give my blog a boost in the process.  I’m looking forward to getting started.