I love that ideas are practically falling in my lap these days…it’s been a couple weeks since I’ve found myself in front of a blank screen, struggling for something to post. The blogosphere is a gold mine of ideas, and the only manual labor involved in the mining process is sliding the mouse over to click the “Follow” button on other bloggers’ sites! Joe Owens, over at Joe’s Musings, just wrote about his intended participation in the 2013 Blogging from A to Z April Challenge, which he himself had found while scouting around on other blogs. From his page, I clicked over to the challenge link for more details, and decided to accept Joe’s dare (oops, I mean invitation) to join him in this month-long challenge.

As you can see from the calendar above (graciously provided by Jeremy, one of the A to Z Challenge hosts) each day in April is assigned a letter, “with Sundays off for good behavior.” The idea is simple…each challenge day, we bloggers will craft a post around that letter. This challenge can be adapted to suit any type of blog–writers and poets can obviously incorporate a word beginning with that letter into the theme, title, dialogue, etc. of their entry. Photographers could post a gallery of photos centered on any word beginning with that letter (Bob Mielke at Northwest Photographer has got April 13 covered…L is for lions!). Food bloggers can include recipes whose main ingredient showcases the featured letter. The possibilities are just endless.

Throughout this challenge, I intend to keep to the overall blogging routine I’ve set for myself, maintaining my own daily themes while incorporating the day’s given letter. It seems counterintuitive that setting more and more restrictions on my posts, and combining so many prompts and challenges within them, is actually boosting my creativity (you probably didn’t even notice–unless you’re following Rarasaur, which I highly recommend–but I just responded to this week’s Prompt for the Promptless). In order to publish quality posts, I’m having to think outside the box, which I admit had gotten pretty small as one by one I let most of my right-brain pursuits fall by the wayside when I entered adulthood. When I meet a creative challenge these days, I get the same high as when I have completed a strenuous workout at the gym…endorphins galore!

So, thank you, Joe for pointing me in the direction of this new challenge. I accept, and am eager to see where the 26-day exercise takes me. If you dare, you can join Joe, me, and the 1400+ other cool kids who’ve already committed to the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge, but hurry, the doors to the clubhouse close April 1!