I’m sure most of you who see my blog posts are already aware of the continuation of the August blogging festival fondly known as Blaugust, despite the loss of the original founder. I don’t want this to be a cause for sadness, so I will only say this much. I’m sure that Belghast had been looking forward to a time when he had a return to a new normal and the strength to get back to Blaugust full time. Tragedy rarely listens to our plans. Many of us who have been less active the past few years have been inspired to get back in the saddle in his memory, and that is a triumph and cause to celebrate. Many of the mentors who stepped up to help with last year’s Blaugust are also on board this year to organize, encourage, and hold the community together. Thank you!

First things first, here is the link to sign up and participate this year. The first part of sticking to any writing project is accountability, and the official sign up does that for me. While there are very few rules for participating in Blaugust and “awards” are on the honor system, you should be aware of the policy regarding the use of AI. A simple rule of thumb is: AI may assist your creative work, but it should not replace your creative contribution.

I’ve decided to do the Community Builder Edition of Blaugust this year. You can read about the two core challenges on Krikket’s blog. They are designed around providing motivation and challenges for people new to Blaugust as well as those who have conquered past challenges and want to focus more on the blogging community. To summarize, I plan to do at least three of these challenges this year:

• Make a post on your blog on or before August 1st, 2026 inviting other bloggers to participate in Blaugust. Make sure you link the signup form. (Ka-ching! checking that one off the list.)
• Make at least 5 posts directly inspired by a post by another Blaugust participant. Make sure you provide a link back to the post in question. (We have some really good writers in the group who bring up interesting topics or talk about mutual interests in books and games, looking forward to this one.)
• Engage with other Blaugust participants at least once per week. Read posts, leave comments, join discussions in the Blaugust Discord and share posts written by others on social media. (This is the bread and butter of building a community and letting people know their words aren’t falling into a void.)
• Guest post on another Blaugust participant’s blog – or have someone else guest post on yours! (I suspect this will be the hardest one to organize but I’m game for working it out.)
• Create or join in a group project – choose a topic, find some other bloggers, and each post your own take on that topic on the same day. (I know a bunch of us have read and loved the Dungeon Crawler Carl books so I’m calling shotgun on this topic.)

There will be more posts introducing the festival over the next few weeks, but here are a couple of early introductions. Contains Moderate Peril has compiled a comprehensive intro post to this year’s August Blogging Festival in a Q&A format. Troypress shares a bit of background info, some talk about losing the founder, and a call to participate in this year’s moving forward with Blaugust. As he writes “So blog. Do it for yourself. Do it for all of us who want to read what you write. Do it for Belghast.” Sentiments I wholeheartedly agree with. Also a big Shoutout to Jaedia (@jaedia@wandering.shop) who put together this year’s official Blaugust logo. There will be a full media kit posted by the mentor team and shared via the Discord.

No matter what inspires you to write this August, there are hundreds of bloggers out there who will be cheering you on. Let’s have a great Festival of Blogging and have some fun!