#atozchallenge Reflections 2017

We've made it to the end of another A to Z Challenge. Well done if you're made it to the end (either blogging, reading or a mixture of the two).

First of all, how I feel the challenge went?

I swithered a bit on which theme I wanted to use for the challenge. I knew I wanted to do it with a theme (because I've found that easier in the past) and I was fairly certain that I wanted to do it about infertility and IVF. The last week of April is Infertility Awareness week so it seems like the right time of year to write about our attempts to start a family.

But I was kind of in a different place this time around compared to the last two times I've blogged about the process. This time we'd just completed a fresh cycle of IVF and had to do a freeze all due to hyperstimulation. We had nine embryos in the freezer and I was feeling such a strong pull towards them, I couldn't get them off my mind.

I've always planned to write letters to my children, right from day one, and so that's what I did. I sat down and gradually crafted 26 letters I'd like my child to read some day, to learn about how they came to be. And along the way I hoped to educate others about the IVF process.

And that's what I did.

It was strangely cathartic to write. It's a strange feeling, finding yourself so connected to something that is essentially just a bundle of frozen cells in a freezer in a Glasgow hospital, and yet which has the potential to be so much more. Writing these letters gave me something to channel that energy into and yet still remain focused on the end goal.

I think that in terms of the theme, it's been my favourite one yet.

Of course, the big thing about this year's challenge was the change in format for sharing your blog and posts. The massive, unwieldy Linky List is no more. Instead each day there was a separate blog post for each letter. People responded in the comments with links to their posts for that day's letter.

I'll admit that I was slightly apprehensive about this approach, but I felt like it worked well.

In terms of posting my own links, I followed the A to Z Challenge page on Facebook, initially intending to comment or respond to posts but ultimately that became my reminder of when to post my link to the day's post. As I wrote my posts and scheduled them ahead of time, I just saved a draft email with the HTML link already formatted for each day. It was just a question of copying and pasting from that email, regardless of whether I was on my laptop or doing it from my phone.

I often ended up in one of the first twenty to post but I wouldn't say I saw more traffic on those days compared to the days when I was one hundred or more down the list. I think I probably got more traffic from commenting on other people's blogs and visiting the blogs of people who visited me.

Most people formatted their entries on the posts really well, so it was easy to click the link (or highlight the link and visit that way). I would probably have seen more visitors if I'd given more of an explanation of what my posts were about. Instead I simply marked it as 'Letters to my Embryos' and then the title of my post for that day. I wonder if people skimmed over it because I didn't give away much about what it was, but by the time I realised that I'd written (and so formatted the links) for most of my posts and I was too lazy to go back and change them.

I was a little more selective with the posts that I read this year. If the link didn't take me to the actual blog post, I tended to ignore them. If I was met with a great wall of text (I know, ironic considering this blog post), unless it was something that captured my attention, I tended to move on to the next one. Despite having internet access at home now, my time is still kind of limited, so I had to be economical with my time.

Google+ also kind of proved to be the bane of my life with people leaving comments on my blog posts. In some instances it took three or four goes to find their own blog to leave my own comment. It's made me more aware of the need to leave my link on every comment I make to make sure people can find their way back to me.

As I said, the lack of the list worked quite well. It was still a little easy for blog posts to get lost in the midst of all the other comments so I think it might be a good idea in the future to come up with some sort of coding system that people can tag their comments with so that you can CTRL+F to find blogs that meet your interests.

Alternatively they could perhaps do a spotlight at the end of each main letter post to highlight some of the posts from the day before. If there were maybe five posts highlighted some blogs might get a little more attention that they could otherwise miss.

At the moment I'm still getting caught up on the comments on my blog during the challenge. I fell behind early so I'm still visiting and commenting on everyone's blogs. I'm going to carry on reading and replying, and hopefully I'll be able to work through the Reflections list as well so may come across some challenge themes I missed on the first go round.

And maybe I'll even join in next year. Hopefully I'll have a real little person I can address these letters to by then!