I want to participate in Blaugust this year. It’s an annual event that takes place in August and focuses on inspiring folks to blog daily throughout the month. Given I was at GenCon until yesterday, I’ve already missed two days; however, I don’t have any more travel scheduled for this month, so I’ll hopefully be able to imperfectly participate quite a bit in this challenge. I’ve known about Blaugust since 2022 (the D20 participation badges that year imprinted on my brain immediately as a TTRPG enthusiast) thanks to folks on mastodon and the Indie Web, but I felt like participating this year because my August should be uneventful. This time last year, I was busy buying a house and getting settled in a new job. Between 2022 and 2024, I was still living in Japan and felt my time was better spent offline, enjoying that opportunity to live abroad. My personal goals for this challenge are to publish more frequently and stop thinking that whatever I draft isn’t worthwhile to share. I often struggle with wanting to write on my blog but not having any inspiration. Blaugust provides a great number of prompts and community inspiration from which to draw. I also love earning achievements, so I hope I’ll be able to publish five posts this month to earn the Bronze Award. This post being my first ever Blaugust post has already earned me the Newbie Blogger Award. I did not prepare for Blaugust before the August 1st start date, but that sounds like a solid idea for next year. I only decided to participate this morning, August 3rd, so I should start outlining some future prompts and posts to help on the days when I don’t feel like writing anything. Here are a few ideas of what to expect from this blog in August: Responses to the weekly Blaugust prompts (week 1: Welcome to Blaugust, week 2: Introduce Yourself, week 3: Creator Appreciation, week 4: Staying Motivated, week 5: Lessons Learned) Reflections on my GenCon 2026 experience Sharing photos of journal spreads since 2018 and reflections on where I was each day as a lead into storytelling Documenting thoughts on the daily Hobonichi 2027 lineup news Sharing a song per post to make an August playlist (the theme will just be my favorite songs) Sharing my “dailies” (routine, internet haunts, etc.) Promoting a roundup of my favorite bloggers from Blaugust ‘26 If writing all month sounds like a fun time, you can join me by signing up for Blaugust here, and don’t forget to set up your RSS feed info correctly, so it’ll be properly ingested into the Dynamic OPML file of all Blaugust participants!