Welcome to August and to Blaugust, the NaNoWriMo of blogging. If you want to know all about the program, let me refer you to Belghast who started the whole idea a few years back. Today I just want to talk about my plans and why I’m participating for the first time.

Let’s start with what I am not committing to: I’m not committing to a daily post. I know myself well enough to know that while I’m sure I COULD do this, I would come out of the experience and probably delete my blog or something. I would grow to really resent blogging as it would have become one more chore I had to do every day. I don’t think it is a coincidence that that last time I wrote any fiction was the last day of the last NaNoWriMo I did many many years ago (2006, I think).

I have done the daily blog thing in the past. Or at least the Mon-Fri Daily Blog thing. It kind of sucked but I was getting paid for it so, as an old friend of mine was fond of saying, “That’s why they call it work.” I know I can do it, but I know doing it grows resentment.

My plan is to aim for 2-3 posts per week, and if I do more that’s great. 2-3 posts still represents a huge increase in the amount of posts I’ve been writing the past few years, when months and months have gone by without me writing anything. I also feel like 2-3 posts is few enough that I can write something meaningful, at least to me. I don’t want a bunch of dull posts that were just written to say I’d written a post. Going back to NaNoWriMo, one year I had finished the story I wanted to tell and was short of 50K words so I spent the last few days of NaNo injecting sex scenes into the story. It didn’t make the story any better but sex scenes are easy and fun to write. 🙂

Now as to why I’m doing it at all. The timing is perfect for me this year. After a brutal first half of the year, work-wise, things have eased up this summer. I’m only working 40 hours & feel like I have some available bandwidth to devote to blogging. I also have been yearning to create something but I am struggling to decide what it is I want to do. I figure writing a few times a week will at least prime the pump some. And lastly, I was feeling sad that Dragonchasers was effectively dead. This is an old blog; my first post is from May 2002. I wanted to see if there’s any life left in blogging for me. If I completely fail at Blaugust it might be time to humanely euthanize Dragonchasers. I hope that isn’t the case.

Oh and lastly because at this point I’m even boring myself, I want to try and branch out a little. Originally Dragonchasers was about gaming and movies and books and food and all kinds of random stuff. At some point I got the idea that I needed it to be focused so I dropped everything but gaming related stuff. I think I had a fantasy about it becoming a side-hustle or something (though back then we didn’t say “side-hustle”). I am officially rejecting that idea as of right now. Dragonchasers is going back to being my blog about stuff that interests me. If it finds an audience, that’s cool, but if it just becomes essentially my online journal, that’s cool too. Honestly the most popular posts in the history of Dragonchasers were a couple about Green Lemonade I wrote when I was trying to change my eating habits!