Friday, October 31, 2014

Final thoughts

It's a beautiful fall day, and this is my last post on bold living.
[Image courtesy of the Wheel of Time reread on Tor.com]
















It's been an interesting project, one that I both enjoyed and abhorred.

What I liked about it

As a writer, my two biggest challenges center on finding the motivation to write and deciding what to write about. This blog challenge took care of both for me; I already had my topic, and I knew I had to write something every day. It was refreshing to not have to wrestle with either of those challenges for once.

Any time you focus on one thing for days and days, you learn more about it than you normally would. You notice it in everyday conversations, in movies and TV shows, in advertisements. About a week into this challenge, I perked up any time someone said the word "bold," and had to resist the temptation to take notes on everything they said after that. I noticed the different ways people used the word to describe actions, and I was constantly watching people for examples of how they incorporate boldness into their lives.

This challenge also affected me in ways I didn't anticipate. As I dug deeper into bold living, I was forced to delve deeper into sections of my own life. Boldness became a tool to solve issues I was grappling with, and a magnifying glass to help me identify areas I needed to improve in—often in ways I wouldn't have tried before.

What I disliked about it

It's called a 31-day blog challenge for a reason. There were times I didn't even want to use any form of the word "bold," I was so sick of it. I would long to write about insignificant things—my craving for pizza, the contact I lost this morning after I put it in, anything!—without having to justify how it fit into bold living.

Writing every day was difficult, too. Weekends were especially hard, since I rarely blog on Saturdays and Sundays. You probably noticed that those posts were less meaty than the weekday ones.

Would I do it again?

Maybe. The arguments for and against match up pretty evenly. (Although the personal growth aspect should probably get more weight, meaning the pros outweigh the cons.)

But for now, I'm happy to be done. I'm going to try to keep up my new daily writing habit during November via my own version of NaNoWriMo, but this blog will go back to normal. Hallelujah.

Some final stats
  • My page views for this month more than quadrupled my previous record. Traffic started spiking a few weeks before I started this challenge, though, so I don't think the extra traffic was solely because of this challenge.
  • Most popular post: bold literary characters.
  • My favorite post: probably the corn maze one.

And, that's a wrap! My 31-Days of Bold Living page now has 31 entries.

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