I achieved my goal for Blaugust 2026, which was to turn many of my smaller ideas for articles into actual posts. 

When I started the month, my document with ideas and drafts of blog posts was 261 pages long and had 44,527 words. When I finished the month, it was 171 pages long and had 31,605 words.

Many of these smaller ideas had languished for years, so I was happy to get them out in some form.

I hadn’t planned to actually publish a post for every day of August, but I had more than enough material: 31 posts for the Rainbow Diamond prize, lol!

Blaugust took me from 313 posts and pages here on this site to 344. I also hadn’t planned to hit each of the major topic categories of the blog but did. (See the Articles dropdown menu for a list of these.)

I resurrected seven posts from my defunct conlanging site, Langmaker, that hadn’t made the book, but everything else had not been published before, so 24 posts were new. I did have plans to move some things over from my LiveJournal, which I started in 2001, but most of the early posts were private and personal and cringeworthy, and I did not enjoy revisiting them.

The most popular post of the month, by an order of magnitude, was Lapine: The Rabbit Language from Watership Down. Posting 31 times in August as opposed to 5 times last year (every Saturday) only produced 1% more page views. Most of my traffic comes from evergreen posts rather than new posts.

I don’t know if I will do this festival again next year, but I’m glad I did it this year. Belghast, I salute you.

Photo by Nadiia Ganzhyi on Unsplash.