It’s the final week of ‘Blogging 101’. Five more days of following an entirely optional course about blogging and being unnecessarily sarcastic about the whole process…

Or maybe not…

Maybe the final week is the time to get serious. I don’t want to look back and regret a missed opportunity when they decide on the classification of my ‘Blogging 101’ certificate. What do you mean I don’t get a certificate? Why else would anyone do this? Not for the ‘Blogging 101’ badge surely? ‘Cos they give you that at the start of the course…

Regardless, I can’t carry on blogging about blogging indefinitely. This is my 40th post on ‘James Proclaims’, and over 25% of my posts have been about ‘Blogging 101’. Indeed, 32% of my posts so far have been based at least partially on the subject of blogging. By the end of this week, that could well have risen to 41%. That’s quite a bold gambit for a novice blogger to take.

I have, however, worked out that at least two of the assignments for this week are writing tasks, which would, in theory, allow me to remain on course to finish the course—and still allow me two days where I don’t need to blog about blogging. Is everyone on board with that? Excellent.

Ok, here’s the plan. Today’s post is already, very clearly, in the mould of my previous ten ‘Blogging 101’ posts and there’s nothing I can do about that. Well, I could scrap everything I’ve written so far, but that’s 280 words of dynamite material, including this sentence, and I’m not prepared to let all of that go up in smoke.

So what I’ll do is explain what the next three tasks are. Today’s has already been published, and I’m fairly confident—using my clever ruse of looking at the content of the last few incarnations of Blogging 101—what the next two will be. If it turns out I’m wrong, we can all have a good laugh about it tomorrow. But I won’t be wrong.

So here’s how I see the Blogging 101 week shaping up:

• Monday: Publish a post based on your own, personalized take on today’s Daily Prompt.
• Tuesday: Read six posts written in response to yesterday’s prompt, and leave comments on at least two of them.
• Wednesday: Pick a blogging event from the Community Event Listings to try for some instant community.

For today’s task, I need to write something based on the ‘Daily Prompt’. The ‘Daily Prompt’ is a handy little feature on WordPress that is designed to help inspire the dedicated blogger who may be feeling a little uninspired. Obviously, a creative genius like me has no need of such a thing, but I’ll play along.

The only minor issue is the time difference. Technically I should use Monday’s ‘Prompt’, but as I’m in a different time zone to the good people who publish the ‘Daily Prompt’, it didn’t actually appear until quite late in the day. So I was going to do Sunday’s instead…

Alas, Sunday’s prompt was: “Explain why you chose your blog’s title and what it means to you.” This is all well and good, but it is a little too close to the task I completed for ‘Blogging 101’ on day one of this course, so it seemed a bit of a cop-out to rehash it again.

Conversely, Monday’s, when it finally got published, was: “What was your favourite plaything as a child? Do you see any connection between your life now, and your favourite childhood toy?”

This is a much more appealing prompt. But I’ve already written quite a lot today. And tomorrow’s task is just commenting on other people’s blogs, and I’ve already done my sarcastic post on commenting. So what I’ll do is post my take on the ‘Toy Story’ prompt tomorrow in place of the usual disingenuous post about ‘Blogging 101’.

And as an added bonus, the Wednesday task also requires a piece of writing inspired by a ‘Blogging Event’ which is, disappointingly, not an excuse to get dressed up and go and party with a load of other bloggers (which sounds dreadful now I think about it).

So, to reiterate, the plan for the week is to not write about blogging again until Thursday. But then I will again on Friday. And then I never will again. Until I can’t think of anything else to write about…