Writing Words for Nerds #AtoZChallenge--A is for Action

Five days left to the A to Z Challenge.

There are only five days left to the A to Z Challenge for April of this year.

What’s the point in even starting this late?

I only found out about the challenge a few days ago. I noticed this hashtag on Twitter, and so I asked one of my friends who tweeted it. “What’s the #AtoZChallenge?” She didn’t answer me, but a few days ago I saw it again. So I asked again. This time a second friend shared the link to the website. 

The A to Z Challenge is similar to the NaNoWriMo but for bloggers.

As with NaNoWriMo, people commit themselves to writing something within a month. With NaNoWriMo you commit to writing a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. With the A to Z Challenge, people commit to writing a blog post for every day in April except for Sundays. 

People sign up in March and choose one of a variety of themes. There’s a theme for pretty much everything, from animals to writing. Even humor and personal writing are options. Bloggers then go through the alphabet based on their chosen theme. For example, a blogger who chose humor could write about airplane travel on the first, boogers on the second, and California on the third.  

 And because of Passover--and the fact that I only found out about this right before Passover--I didn’t have time to start working on it until last night.

Why start at all then? 

I mean, I’m not a time traveler. (Not yet, anyway. Not that I know of. Future me might disagree.) I can’t go back to the first of April to start writing and posting an article a day.

And very strangely, this segues very nicely into my first blog post. My chosen theme is writing, specifically, "writing words for nerds." 

And my first blog post in the A to Z Challenge is about...

  

A is for Action

You can edit a page of garbage, as writers say, but you can’t edit a blank page.

Recently, my blog has been a series of blank pages. 

You see, I want to use my blog to help other people, or as Gilbert Garfinkle would put it, “fix the world.” 

If you look around you’ll find serious posts about how to write funny, whether to submit your work to traditional publishers or indie published, a step-by-step guide to publishing a picture book, and lots more. 

So when it comes to writing a new blog post, I find it hard to compete with myself. I find it hard to match that same level of helpfulness as the posts I've already done. 

Yes, I could write a hilarious blog post about cats or about my book addiction. (I blame my heritage for the latter. I grew up in a house where we used bookcases in place of wallpaper, and one of my great grandfathers died when he tried to reach a book on a high shelf and the entire bookcase collapsed on his frail old body. I also have an uncle who died when he was packing up his books to donate them to a library. My family lives by the book and dies by the book.) I guess they could fix the world in a small way by giving someone a laugh. The more laughter there is in the world, the better. 

But how does that compare to helping people publish their books or make life-altering decisions?

It doesn’t.

But neither does a blank page.

So A is for Action.

A is for doing.

A is for writing those pages, even if they’re garbage.

A is for starting the A to Z Challenge, even if it is April 26^th and you only have five days left to write 26 blog posts.

It doesn’t have to be great. It can be absolute garbage.

The only thing it can’t be is a blank page.  

~*~

Now to start working on my next Writing Words for Nerds A to Z Challenge: B is for Books.