Closing thoughts on the April A to Z Challenge

I've already launched into A Story A Day In May, but thought I'd pause my short story frenzy (aka: extreme headdesking as I try to pull something together in a day with very little time to write), for a little retrospective.

Taking a tour through a smattering of my characters served to light the fires of want. I want to work on these stories and play with these characters again. Some were from published works and some from works in submission right now, but others have been languishing on my hard drive for years. How unfair of me. Of course, they're going to be put off for another month while I bring some new characters into the world, but I do want to get back to them sometime soon before those fires turn back into embers.

In visiting some of my A to Z neighbors, I found some fun new blogs to follow. Yes, they're all writers. Surprise! As much as I tried to expand my horizons...well, I didn't.

A big thank you to those of you who came back day after day with comments. I love comments. They make me get excited to check my email. It's not so exciting to check it when you're generally just waiting for rejections to come in. Not that this prevents me from obsessively checking it. It's just nice to get some positive things in there too. So thank you for that.

What surprised me most was how many people dropped out throughout the month. I moved almost a hundred places on the list. A big cheer to all my blog neighbors who snuck up through the ranks with me. None of the blogs I'd been visiting dropped out. Virtual high fives all around!

The feature I enjoyed most was the category listings on blogs. It made it much easier in my limited time to hunt down blogs that had a possibility of being something I'd find interesting. While I did regularly visit several of my blog neighbors who were not writing oriented, those who reciprocated visits (both neighbors and otherwise) were mostly in the same category. In that regard, I wonder if it would be even more effective for those, like me, who are in specific category to have category lists rather than one giant one with everyone together. I admit that after the first week, (other than returning comments) I skimmed the big list and sought out only those with my category tag. I probably would have visited more of my category if they were all in one easy to access place.

I would like to do the challenge again next year. Obviously I will need a new theme. I can't very well share another twenty-six characters who just happen to have names starting with every letter of the alphabet. It would be intentional this time and that just sucks the fun out of it. Good thing I have a year to come up with something. The ideas are already forming.