New Year, New A to Z, New Goals!

Welcome to 2016! How has the year been treating you so far? Are you ready for your normal schedule to resume?

Do you still need time to recover from the holidays?

Here at the A to Z Challenge, we are working like busy little bees in the background to continue the A to Z excellence. We are in full on planning mode right now to making goals, making lists and filling in the details.

What are your goals for the A to Z Challenge for 2016?  Make sure you set deadlines for your goals, otherwise you won't get them finished in time. Plus, once you reach a goal, you can cross it off of your list and celebrate that victory!

Ok, so maybe you can't kill everyone in the room like James Bond but crossing off items on your to do list is very satisfying.

Another great thing about setting goals early is that as you are working through them you'll see where you need more work or you'll see what won't work. Starting early means you have plenty of time to change directions, change plans, or even start over.

Don't let procrastination be your guide for the 2016 Challenge. I've seen alot of well intentioned bloggers quite the challenge because they couldn't keep up. Which makes me sad.

The line I like the most in this quote is "expect to win." It's great, isn't it? If you set out to win and expect to win, you're bound to win, it's all in your head.  When I was a girl my piano teacher used to encourage me by giving me a pretend confidence pill.  If I had only swallowed that confidence pill I might have become a better piano player. Instead, I listened to all the bad notes and focused on my  incorrect finger positions rather than on the good bits that I played.  What I've learned from my piano teacher is that whether I win or not is all in my head.  I use this self talk every time I start a project.

To be sure, Teddy might not have participated in the A to Z Challenge but I bet he knew a thing or two about goals and deadlines! Don't let April catch up on you unawares. Start planning your part of the challenge now: choose your theme, collect your photos or your images, set up your computer folders and schedule your writing time now so when March and April come around you're ready. 

Don't end up like Scar. Be ready for the Challenge. I want you to complete it. I plan on having such an awesome 2016 Blogging Challenge that Morgan Freeman should narrate it.

Let's Do This People!

Characters Who Blog

Well, it's December and time for one of my favorite activities, watching holiday movies! The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, Home Alone, and my personal favorite . . . DIE HARD! (And yes, it absolutely does count as a Christmas movie). So I thought we might like to see what John McClane would blog about during the A to Z Challenge. Let's take a look, shall we? 

And there you have it, the A to Z series of a major action hero. I personally like his letter "K" the best! I hope you all have started thinking about what themes you might feature on your blogs next April. Have a wonderful Wednesday and happy blogging! 

Road Trip Themes for Blogging from A-Z Challenge Participants

The April A-Z Challenge is a big undertaking for bloggers of all levels. There's always the question of whether you will choose a theme or wing it when delivering on your commitment to post something on your blog every day for 26 days.

The real fun begins as you attempt to make your way in and around all 2,000 (give or take) places listed on the visiting map for this annual alphabet party town. While the insanely fast and wildly diligent men and women of our community manage to get it done, the A-Z Challenge Road Trip is for the rest of us. It brings remaining survivors together for an extended trip to cover additional ground leftover from April, but on cruise control.

So, here are two A-Z Road Trip inspired theme ideas that may help you with some of the toughest tasks in the challenge -- picking topics to blog about and visiting everyone on the list.

Blogs of the Day - List five favorite blog posts you read, for each letter of the alphabet. This theme involves visiting blogs on the A-Z signup list to find links that are worth sharing with your readers. In turn, those who visit to find out what your top picks are for the day will learn about blogs that might interest them. Everyone wins.

Of course, there is an alternative route to consider if you're the scheduling type of person who wants to enjoy the fun parts of this theme without the spontaneity of hitting "publish" every day. Since signups open up a few months in advance, you can start visiting blogs and go through their regular content to find something you like. Once you've found five different blogs for each letter of the alphabet, schedule your posts as usual and title them according to the traits they have in common. Or, just make up your own.

A-Z Social - Step it up a notch and be the go-to spot for all things related to what's happening within the A-Z community. Do a roundup of activities such as blog posts that are being shared (commented on, etc.) the most, tweets worth highlighting and/or blog comments that standout. As a surveyor of social activity related to the A-Z Challenge, your blog might become a cool watering hole for this community, in April.

Joining fellow bloggers on the A-Z Challenge Road Trip is an opportunity to visit undiscovered places and meet new faces you missed. However, making the Road Trip a part of your April blogging activities can be a way to make sure that you don't miss out on much!

Will you be taking any road trips during this holiday season?

The A-to-Z Challenge Road Trip is hosted by Nicole Ayers and C. Lee McKenzie who’s well-traveled  dashboard buddy Mario is gearing up for a great 2016!

Goodbye 2015. Hello Christmas.

It has been quite a year on the road this 2015. Here's a recap of some things that have made this year full and fabulous.


New Books Galore. Every time I visited a blog there were new books from the writers I've been connecting with for a few years. 

We had a great AtoZ Challenge with so many amazing bloggers entering to provide interesting and entertaining posts throughout April.

The Team put together a year long tribute to Tina who organized so well for the AtoZ Challenge. She was greatly missed, and hugely valued by her friends.

Some new Hops filled up the Summer Days and linked us with other bloggers we might have missed otherwise!

Unfortunately, a lot of the bloggers we enjoyed retired or took long breaks, but they left with grace and for good reasons.

Jeremy Hawkins designed a super T-shirt for the AtoZ Challenge Survivors. 

The Insecure Writers Group continued to be a huge success each first Wednesday of the month with so many excellent and supportive posts.


There's a lot more, but these were the highlights for me. Now I'm fastening my seatbelt and getting ready for 2016. This is my last AtoZ Challenge post of 2015, so I leave you now to hunt down the tree and find the egg nog.

Themes That Rocked the Challenge - Lady Monsters!

Diana Gordon at Part Time Monster went with the theme of lady monsters!

Your theme was Lady Monsters – was it an obvious choice given that your blog is called Part Time Monster?

Writing about female monsters seemed like the obvious choice once I thought of the idea to use Lady Monsters as the A to Z theme, yes. I actually hadn't written much monster-themed content before the challenge. But I do focus a lot of my writing on girls and women. I decided to marry that with my interest in monsters. There are a lot of female monsters who don't get much press time, and it seemed worthwhile to start talking about them, and to talk about them not just as monsters but as women, too.

Which Lady Monster was your favorite?

I think my favorite to write about was Queen Grimhilde, the Evil Queen from Disney's Snow White. She's iconic. It was quite an experience to write about a villain that has terrified me since childhood.

Which letter was the most difficult?

I didn't have a difficult time with any of them, oddly enough---but I suppose that the problem with this theme was that there were so very many possibilities to choose from, and only 26 could make the cut. There are a lot of fascinating monsters out there. I didn't really set parameters for where I'd pull from---so there are movie, TV, and comics characters plus mythological monsters from several different cosmologies just in those 26 posts. There are so many lady monsters that now, almost a year later, we're still writing about them. After A to Z, I started Monster Mondays, a weekly feature focusing on female monsters with several contributors. We're already planning our 2016 run.

Did you have a favorite monster you had to leave out?

I've since had a chance to write about her, but I really wanted to include Dragon from the Shrek franchise in the original run. Dzunukwa, a Native American mythological figure, made the list instead.

Irena Dubrovna Reed was the main character in The Cat People. Which version of the film do you like better, 1942 or 1980, and why?

I definitely prefer the 1942 version of Cat People to the remake. There's a sense of something about the first one--what I can only describe as impending doom. Irena knows about her curse, is steeped in the legends of her Serbian ancestors and afraid of her own sexuality because of what might happen. There's so much meaning in that, so many layers to pull apart as her lover and her psychiatrist try to puzzle all of this out. The 1980 version is almost devoid of that sense because Irena has been raised by a foster family and knows nothing of her ancestry.

That said, the 1980 film is a fascinating contrast with the 1942 original, and both tell us a lot about the sorts of women we fear, how those fears morph over time.

Why is the Chimera considered a hybrid and symbolizes wickedness?

The Chimera is, herself, a hybrid--though Greek sources vary a bit on her description, they seem to agree that she has parts of a dragon, of a lion, and of a goat. The Chimera was a great monster---she flew about burning the land and eating lots of cattle until she was killed in battle.

In the medieval ages, the Malleus Maleficarium, a famous treatise against witches, described women as a chimera, made of three corrupted parts. It is this work that aligned the Chimera with general wickedness and the female sex.

Why does the Red Queen have such a big head?

The Red Queen's power went straight to her head, enlarging it to 3 times its normal size. It is an outward manifestation of her inward condition, an inflated sense of self that overwhelms everything she does. It also infantalizes her---baby's heads are proportionally much larger than adults.

What theme are you considering for next year’s Challenge?

While I'd love to say that I have that all figured out, it would be so far from the truth! I generally start planning for A to Z in February. The one thing I can definitively say is that I plan to continue my pattern of focusing on girls and women---in 2014, my first year in the challenge, my theme was Girls in Children's Literature, and 2015 was, of course, Lady Monsters. 2016 will continue the thread.


Co-host Ninja Captain Alex J. Cavanaugh is the author of Amazon Best-Sellers CassaStar, CassaFire, CassaStorm, and Dragon of the Stars, and his blog can be found HERE