Wednesday Chatter: Why I Failed At Blogoween

Wednesday Chatter is a weekly feature at Ruby's Books where we'll be talking about anything and everything related to books and reading. Click here if you want to see what we talked about in the previous weeks

WARNING: Some bad words might be used in the following post. Don't say I didn't warn you!

Hello my fellow book lovers! Today's post is going to be a little bit more serious than my latest Wednesday Chatter posts. Today I wanted to talk to you about Blogoween, why I failed it, and why sometimes taking a break isn't the best thing for me.

Why I Failed At Blogoween

Blogoween was Clo's baby a.k.a Book Dragons. She came up with this amazing idea of a month-long even full of prompts, posts, tags, reviews and anything else a blogger might do for October. The theme was simple: Anything related to Autumn and Halloween was welcome. There was a list of 31 daily prompts, with different hosts every 4 or so days, and the participating bloggers had to write as many or as few blog posts as they desired, they just had to choose from three levels. Me being the overly-confident, fresh out of ARC August blogger that I am, decided to go full out and do the full 31 days. For the first week I managed to keep up with the posts. Then...life happened.

Source: Gifer

A quick rundown of how I write posts for my blog:

• I usually write in the morning. You can think of it as a personal check list. Wake up, do my morning routine, eat, drink coffee, open email, blog. If I don't manage to blog in the morning, I get stressed out, because then I kind of pressure myself into writing, which usually ends up in that post being discarded because I'm never quite as happy with it as I should be in order for me to post it.
• I usually write daily. Look, I'm okay with scheduling posts in advance. I've done it, I'm still doing it, I think it's an awesome thing to do. But the thing is, even if I have, say, this entire week scheduled, I still have to write. If I don't write daily, I get... I don't want to say out of a writing mood, but I occupy my time with anything else and I kind of forget to write.
• I stress over the smallest thing. The thing you need to remember about me is that I, like I assume a lot of content creators out there do, struggle with being happy with the things I write. I'm usually more comfortable writing reviews and gushing over the latest cover I've seen, than any other type of posts. So sometimes if I'm not posting it's not because I haven't written anything for that day or because I have no ideas, it's because I'm just not happy with the finished result enough to put it out there. This is something I need to get better at, really, but I assume all writers (let's face it, people, bloggers are writers at their core, even if they don't write fictional stories) struggle with this.

So with that in mind, let's get back to Blogoween. 

Source: Gifer

I have no reason for this GIF except I really, really wanted a Hocus Pocus gif in my post lol

Basically what happened was that one day I couldn't write. I had dog school to go to and when I got back home I was beat. I told myself I'd do it the next day, but the next day was yet another dog school day. And so the weekend flew by. I tried to get back in the groove of things, and I almost caught up at one point, but then I again had to miss a day of writing.

So, in a nutshell, l failed spectacularly. And here's why:

• I got self conscious - A few of those posts required some imagination and a way with words that I've rarely had. So whenever I had to write those posts I always questioned the quality of it, if it made any sense, if it matched the prompt properly, etcetera etcetera
• I got lazy - So remember what I said about not writing every day? Basically I get comfy in my "nothing-to-do" zone, and it takes me a while to get out of it. It's not that I don't want to, it's just that Procrastination should have been my middle name. 
• Book slump won me over - My blogging slump always matches up with my reading slump, and I was in a reading slump for the better part of October. I managed to beat it, which coincides with me writing this post and others as well
• I don't do half measures - I'm the first person to say that sometimes you need a break to clear your head. But I can't do a half break or a short break. My breaks are epic and intense. If I take a break from reading, I stop reading for weeks. If I take a blogging break, it takes me about a month to find my groove again. It's what happened here too, but I'm getting back in the rhythm of it all.
• Real life sometimes sucks the joy out of everything - My personal life right now isn't the best ever, and it's slightly taking the joy out of the simple things. I know there are a lot of people out there like me, but right now knowing that is just depressing rather than reassuring/comforting. So sometimes that gets me down enough to not find the energy to write. I'm tricking my blues by forcing myself to write and look, I wrote a post!

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I failed at Blogoween because, ultimately, I allowed myself to say "I'll do this tomorrow". That's really at the core of things. It's a combination of procrastination and mental energy. I think I also psyched myself up too much, which in turn made me be extra critical of what I was doing and what I was writing. I think the lesson here is to try to write every day, don't be so overwhelmed with doubts and insecurities, and, most importantly, be more organized.

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What about you? Did you ever fail spectacularly at a month-long event, or felt like you did? Do you know why? What did you take out of the experience?