The A to Z Challenge and the big reveal

All over the world, curtains are rising as bloggers reveal their themes for next month’s A to Z Challenge, and that’s also true here at Roamin’ Gnomials.

I’ve never participated before, so I wasn’t quite sure what to do. I batted around a few ideas, but kept coming back to my first thought, which was to write about the special people in my life whose names begin with the appropriate letter.

Right away, problems cropped up. In some cases, I know several people whose names begin with the same letter, and other instances where I don’t know a soul with a name beginning with the letter du jour, much less a special person.

Another thing I worried about was whether it would be possible to make my special people your special people, too. In other words, how will readers who don’t know me, my family or my friends, find anything interesting in reading about a bunch of strangers?

What to do? Well, if you’re sane, you start looking for another theme right away! But sanity has never been a hallmark at Roamin’ Gnomials, so despite the evident problems, I thought to myself, “Well, they do call it a challenge for a reason, so sure, bring it on!”

The way I figure, if I’m going to spend all this time writing alphabetical blog posts, then it should be something that’s worth the effort, and writing about the special people in my life is a project that’s worth my time. If I can somehow keep you reading about people you don’t even know, then maybe it’s because you’ll see things in my people that will make you think of your people, too.

Whoever we are and wherever we live, we have more similarities than differences, and if my words about my people move you to some day write about yours, then by god, I’ve done a good job!

In the final analysis, we are writers, not talkers, and writing takes time. With that in mind, maybe it’s not too soon to start the practice of leaving behind a few words to let people know just how much we appreciate them. In fact, in some cases, it could already be too late.

Of course no one is planning to stop writing anytime soon, but who can ever know about such things? Could be all any of us have left are 26 ticks of the clock — or 26 ticks of the A to Z Challenge. It’s why I decided it wasn’t too early to start.