Come April, bloggers of all shapes, sizes and genres go bananas.

They voluntarily- and sans remunerative compensation- enroll themselves to a grueling annual blogging ritual. All through the month of April they commit to writing a post a day on all days except Sundays. The remaining twenty six days are devoted to the twenty six letters of the alphabet making this the AtoZ Challenge. To lend a semblance of sanity to this insane month of reading and writing, they sometimes choose a theme so that they may decide on the things they will NOT write.

This is the first time I am going to participate in the A-Z Challenge. I didn’t dare to last year, though I ran along those who participated. I did not write a post on the alphabet of the day, but I did write twenty- six posts in the month of April. Considering that my average output was never more than four posts a month, it was a major effort. If I sound smug it is because I AM smug.

Having churned out twenty six posts in April, I needed to prove to myself that this wasn’t just temporary insanity industry (damn the similar looking words!). I therefore churned out twenty five posts in May and twenty four in June. And then I realized that the thing they say about post regularly to improve your blog traffic wasn’t bunkum at all. They were deadly serious, by gawd!

Truth is, after I did all that work, I sat and kicked myself steadily for the next few months. I mean, I might as well have taken the challenge and earned some bragging rights. In hindsight (that’s the place where the stupidest among us are bristling with wisdom), it seemed mighty silly to have missed out.

This year, therefore, we aren’t missing out on licking (figuratively ONLY please!) the challenge. This year, we are participating with bells in our hair. And we are going to be mighty noisy about it too. Be warned, therefore.

Now that I’ve decided to be challenged (that’s different from being handicapped– I’ve already got that pat), I thought I’ll make things a little easier for myself by doing a bit of planning. Of course, I never stick to plans. The more elaborate they are the less I am likely to follow them. I don’t know why, but it pleases me no end. Like I put a fistful of salt in your soup when you weren’t looking and went back to eating my soup, looking virtuous and demure.

My phrase for 2014 is Step Out and that’s the theme I’ll be following for the challenge too.

I hope to find twenty six reasons to urge me to Step Out and be counted.

There are two basic motivators. It is either the pain of losing something or the pleasure of gaining something. It is neatly summed up thus:

We do what we do to gain a gain or to avoid a pain.

~Anonymous

The emotions ruling the states of pain and pleasure are brought into play by the moving away from and moving towards values, respectively. The twenty six posts during the challenge will be a short discussion about a moving away from or a moving towards value.

Twenty six reasons to Step Out! Should be lots of fun!

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