LFGryph

Ok. I’m going to take a break from writing tomorrow’s post brain-dumping about Good Omens Season 2, in order to write up the traditional, “Hey, I’m doing Blaugust!” post.

Blaugust is, to quote directly, “a month-long event that takes place in August each year that [focuses] on blogging and other serialized content. The goal is to stoke the fires of creativity and allow bloggers and other content creators to mingle in a shared community while pushing each other to post more regularly.” You can find more info over on Belghast’s blog: https://aggronaut.com/2023/07/12/blaugust-2023-is-coming/. In short, it’s a fun online event that Belghast runs yearly – and has done for 10 years now! – to encourage and support people in their goals of posting, reading, and making connections.

For my own Blaugust story, I participated and “won” Blaugust back in 2015. I say “win” only in the sense that I did make a blog post for each day of August, I certainly wasn’t the person with the most posts! I wanted to get into writing again, and Blaugust seemed like a good way to incentivize myself to Just Do The Thing. I believe I attempted one other Blaugust in 2016, and then my plans fell apart and I wound up not participating much.

I did learn a lot about how to put out regular content and I legitimately made some friends I cherish to this day. 🙂 It gave me an excuse to set up this blog and get a little refresher course on web design. I also, in hindsight, put a lot of pressure on myself to only make Real Blog Posts. So there had to be a theme, multiple pics to break up the text, the whole shebang. I mostly tried to keep it to gaming, as well, since I wanted this to be a Gaming Blog. I’d have to go through all the posts to see how successful I was, but that was the goal I set for myself.

This year, I’m working on something different in my creative life, in a general sense. I often struggle with the hang up of, “If I can’t do it perfectly, I’d better not do it at all.” In my streaming especially, I’m working on trying less hard to be “perfect.” There are days I absolutely want to stream…but my hair is a mess. Or I don’t have time to set up my game Just Right. Or I can’t stream at the time I said I would stream. Or I’m not feeling the game I had planned, I want to play something different. Or I’m tired and not sure I can do an entire 3-4 hour run. And then I mostly Just Don’t Do The Thing.

I’m trying to get over that.

Since I’m trying to do that in my creative life overall, I thought Blaugust might be a good way to experiment with it. So, I do not intend to do a perfect Blaugust this year.

I intend to post something daily, yes. But not necessarily a fully formed and “perfect” blog. Maybe it’ll be my lightly edited VOD from a livestream. Maybe it’ll be rambling about Good Omens, or my job, or the cats. Maybe there won’t be any pictures because I worked for 11 hours (I work at an animal shelter, so that’s 11 hours of highly emotionally/mentally/physically impactful work) and I’m too tired to find a visual representation of my topic. Maybe I’ll throw some of my highly not professional doodles up. Or a picture of a meal I cooked that I’m super pleased with.

This first post itself is going to be shorter than I like, with less pictures, and less editing. I’m going to make myself do that, because I quite frankly need to get more comfortable with the entire process and feeling of putting out work that I haven’t fretted endlessly over. We have two cats to get to the vet for checkups today, and it’s a streaming day (https://www.twitch.tv/darkgryphon42) – I have other obligations, is what I’m saying.

Another interesting point, for me, with this year’s Blaugust is last time I was not yet diagnosed with or truly aware of my ADHD. So I’m curious how that will change my experience of participating in something that is effectively working to build a habit in someone whose brain chemicals are wonky about that sort of thing. I suspect it will go better as this time I’m more aware of how my brain works and what kind of help and support I need, and that I’ll also be gentler with myself. If I want to hyperfocus and type up 3 blog post in one day, I’m not “doing it wrong.” I’m doing it the way my brain prefers to do it.

If you’re interested in joining – and daily posts do not have to be your goal! – I absolutely invite you to check out that informational post I linked at the start. It’s a great group of people, and worth participating for that alone. If not today, then soon I’ll have a new page up on this blog with the 2023 Blogroll. I’ll edit this post with a link once I have it set up, but it’ll be under the “About” tab. [Here: https://lfgryph.com/about/blaugust-blogroll-2023/]

Happy Blaugust to those participating or just reading along! Now I’m gonna start some laundry and contemplate the logistics of a double cat vet appointment.

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Curious about #Blaugust2023? Visit the Blaugust 2023 is Coming page, where you can also join the Discord. Or check out #Blaugust2023 on social media.