Learning From Experience And Other Fantastic Tales

As Blaugust winds up for another year, we find ourselves in reflective mode with "Lessons Learned" week. Each year I come back to this event I find some new way of making it more difficult than it needs to be and 2023 has been no exception.

On the face of it, learning from your mistakes seems like a universal good. It can't possibly hurt to figure out where you went wrong, can it? And if you can spin that up into some way of avoiding the same mistakes next time, so much the better, right?

It's not always quite that straightforward. The problem with learning lessons is applying what you've learned. 

Something a lot of people probably find themselves doing is fighting the last battle not the current one. I do it all the time. You find something out about yourself or something you've done and swear to change it or do it differently next time, only next time is different to the first time so the solution doesn't quite match the problem any more.

Let me revisit my Blaugust record:

2015 - My first year although I didn't formally sign up. I was nervous about all the form-filling, apparently, which sounds like an excuse, and scared of Anook, which sounds like a joke. What the heck was Anook, anyway?

My goal was to post thirty-one times and I hit it. At the time I would have been working almost full-time, I think, so it was tough. My wrap-up "How did it all go?" post is hedged with doubts and uncertainties. I summed up with "If Belghast runs Blaugust again next year I'll think very carefully before deciding whether to join in". I also asked myself if I'd enjoyed it and answered "not really".

2016 - It seems I did learn my lesson that year. I did not sign up in 2016, nor did I "shadow" the event. I stuck to my regular posting schedule of the time, posting just twelve times in August. It doesn't look as though I bothered to mention the end of Blaugust at all that year. I just let it slip away.

2017 - And that, I guess, should have been the end of it. There was no Blaugust in 2017. Belghast explained the absence in his recent post about Blaugust's Tenth Anniversary, saying he'd "allowed the naysayers to convince me that I was doing more harm than good with this event". I don't think I was a naysayer per se - I wasn't really saying anything about Blaugust at all - but if asked I would certainly have been in the "I'm not sure this is such a great idea..." camp. Obviously, given Bel's comment, there was a lot of that going on at the time. 

2017 was also the year I published the lowest number of posts in the history of this blog. It seems a lot of people were feeling a bit flat on blogging around then.

2018 - Thankfully, it didn't last. Blaugust returned after its one-year hiatus and I signed up formally for the first time. Apparently I'd become a "mentor" somehow and I was throwing out advice like the Milky Bar Kid on a gold-top bender. Absolutely no explanation of how that happened.

Again, I aimed to post on all thirty-one days, even though I pointed out I didn't have to any more, since thirty-one posts across the whole month was "all" that was required. I made my target and added one for a total of thirty-two.... and I had a great time doing it! 

I don't really know what changed but apparently, despite having found it "slightly" stressful due to my dislike of having to post on work-days, I enjoyed the whole thing enough to finish my post-mortem with a cheery "...let's do it all over again...next year!"

2019 - "Next year", when Blaugust arrived, I was recovering from almost dying from complications with the chemotherapy I was on, following my surgery for colon cancer. Didn't see that coming.  My first post for Blaugust 2018 is a detailed account of my situation, which thankfully was resolved successfully. So successfully, in fact, that for Blaugust 2019 I posted a record forty-two times. I was at home with nothing much to do other than rest and recuperate and blogging was helped fill the time in a hugely satisfying and pleasurable way.I thoroughly recommend blogging as a hobby for shut-ins.

I was so gung-ho about blogging, I didn't even get around to writing my Blaugust postscript until the second of September. My main lesson to be learned seemed to be the ever-unobtainable gold-standard of blogging:  "more short, pithy, posts instead of 2000 word essays" but even as I typed, I acknowledged it was never going to happen. And it hasn't.

2020 - This year, everyone got to experience life as a shut-in, when Covid blew in and blasted Blaugust all the way back to Blapril. In April I posted thirty-five times, concluding "The last thing anyone wants is for people to find blogging turning into a duty, a burden or a chore." 

It hadn't for me. I loved it. Five years on from that tentative beginning, from which it seemed I'd learned Blaugust really wasn't for me, some nebulous ego-stroking, a series of medical emergencies and a global pandemic had somehow turned me into a convert. And you know how annoying they can be. 

2021 - Blaugust returned to its regular summer slot and I had a plan. The world was vaguely working again and so was I. Anticipating timing issues, I prepared the ground in advance, writing ahead on a theme I'd come up with, so I wouldn't have to post on work days. The plan came off splendidly, taking all the stress out of the event, which I enjoyed as much as the ones where I hadn't had to go to work. I posted thirty-three times and signed off in September with the relentlessly upbeat "See you all back here, Summer 2022. Let's make it a date!"

2022 - Last year I began by listing the first-time participants, while complaining about my own incompetence. I seemed to be in chaotic mood, claiming "Blogging is not for perfectionists, that's my take" but I managed to crash my way to thirty-one posts, somehow. Towards the end, a little early for once, I gave my thoughts on how it had all gone, quoting myself on lessons learned the previous year and snarling "Were those lessons learned? Were they hell!"

2023 - Guess what? This year I did learn those lessons and it still didn't make everything all right! 

Maybe I should clarify just what the lessons were. Looking back over all of this, it's apparent to me that I "learn" the same lessons every year. I could save myself some time and just have them printed on a card.

• Do some prep.
• Have some themes ready.
• Write ahead.
• Write for yourself.
  
• Don't burn out.
• Cut yourself some slack.
• Pace yourself.
• Accept you can't read everything everyone else writes.
• Accept people may be skipping your stuff too.
  
• Blaugust is a lot! Don't sweat it if it turns out to be too much.
• Above all, have fun. And if you're not having fun, stop.

Probably a few more I forgot. Most of those recur every year I write this post, but the one I want to pull out for special consideration this year is "Write Ahead".

Last year I didn't do that and I got stung. I was scrabbling to get a post out more often than I'd have liked. I didn't take my own advice to cut myself some slack and just have fun because I was stubbornly determined to hit my thirty-one posts. I have that dumb "If I say I'll do a thing..." mantra running in my head all the damn time...

This year, I was determined to avoid any Blaugust stress so I thought of a bunch of possible themes, none of which I used. What I did do was write at least two, sometimes three, posts ahead for the whole event. It worked pretty well except for two things I hadn't considered:

• If you write ahead you fall behind.
• Life has a way of blind-siding you.

The first was predictable and yet it still surprised me. With Palia and Dawnlands, I found myself with plenty to write about but because I was publishing my adventures a few days in arrears, I kept getting the time sequence screwed up. I had to learn not to use times and dates to avoid confusing people, except I never did learn to do that so I ended up confusing myself. Also, as I made very clear yesterday, I kept finding out new stuff between writing a post and publishing it, making some of what I did put up just plain wrong and leaving me scrabbling to correct my mistakes.

The second was more of a sod's law kind of situation although, given my recent timeline, I might have guessed it would happen. I was already in the system for a hernia repair operation before Blaugust started but I wasn't expecting to be called in for several months, it being considered a non-urgent procedure. Instead, I got a call in the middle of the month asking me if I wanted to take a cancellation and I ended up having the op last Tuesday. 

I was home the same day but now I'm staying home for two weeks to recover, so all that writing ahead turns out to have been superflous to requirements. I never have any trouble getting a post out in days when I don't work and when I'm mostly confined to the house it's even less of an issue. 

I'm actually pretty mobile, able to take Beryl for walks, although throwing a ball for her isn't such a great idea, but I can't do much gardening or general household labor for a couple of weeks, so I have ample time to sit at a keyboard and type whatever comes into my head, as you can plainly see.

After all of that, I think I might be going out of the "Lessons Learned" business, at least until I learn to predict the future. I think I'm going to stick with the "deal with it as it comes" method instead. That's generally served me pretty well up to now.

When we get to Blaugust 2024 - making some huge assumptions there that it, I and the world will still be around by then - I will try to write shorter posts, come up with a few themes, do some preparation and get a bit of a post cushion going. They are all helpful techniques. I still endorse them all.

What I won't do is expect doing any of it to make much of a difference. However well you prepare to fight last year's battles, every Blaugust is a new war. In the end, you do what you can and if that doesn't work you do something else. That's the lesson I've learned. 

This year, anyway...

*** A note on the illustrations ***

All images generated at NightCafe. 

The first four were all generated using Stable Diffusion v 1.5 with the modifiers "cel shaded" and "pop art". 

The first three were generated using the same prompt with just the year changed each time: "A big poster with "Blaugust 20xx" on it". The years were 2015, 2018 and 2021. They are used in the post in chronological order so the "2018" poster is the one with the number "21" on it. The only one with a number at all, in fact.

The fourth was generated using the prompt "Write Ahead".

The fifth image was generated using Stable Diffusion v. 2.1. and the same modifiers. The prompt used was "Staying Home".