Nerd Girl Thoughts

I’m sure that no one who’s been hanging out with me here awhile is going to be surprised when I say the past couple of months, I’ve been blogging while riding The Struggle Bus. In fact, if I weren’t smack dab in the middle of a big project, which I’ve already done the lion’s share of the organizational work for, I might not be blogging at all right now.

So the announcement for Blaugust 2022, while not unexpected, has left me very very conflicted. While I do love a good challenge (and Blaugust always seems to be a Very Good Challenge), I’m not sure that I’m going to be able to really dedicate the time and energy this year to participate in the way I prefer – which is to say, I’m a Rainbow Diamond girl or bust. In order to do that, I need to post 31 times during the month of August, and right now, I’m scrambling to do half that every month.

And then I signed up anyway.

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Of course, participating in Blaugust doesn’t mean you need to post 31 entries next month. In fact, a single post a week over the course of the month is enough to get you a bronze award. Heck, if you’re new to blogging, just the act of creating a new blog and participating at all means you have succeeded!

This year also brings a new component – Blaugchievements! As a almost-but-not-entirely reformed chaser of Nerd Points in everything, this was probably the thing that tipped the scales. While I still want my shiny Rainbow Diamond award at the end of the month, I’m also planning to collect me some trophies. In fact, I’ve gotten the first one already!

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Looking at my content planning calendar, there is some good news. I’ve been bumping a lot of non-project post ideas forever forward, and I already have 18 of the 31 days of August with a planned post. That’s more than half and I haven’t even checked the prompt list yet. I’m going to do my best to have the whole month full of post ideas before the kickoff date of August 1st.

I will say that I’ve been kind of hyper-focused on building and participating in communities right now, so the addition of community-focused (but totally optional) achievement goals definitely influenced my choice to jump off the struggle bus and onto this crazy train for another year.