Introducing Holton's Heroes!

The other co-hosts have introduced their team of assistants (a/k/a "minions"), so I guess I should introduce mine as well.

I asked each of them to write something about themselves, so here's what they had to say...

Dcrelief was born and raised in North Carolina has been blogging since 2006; celebrating ten years April 2016! Currently she maintains three blogs: dcrelief - Remove the Rose Colored Glasses, dcrelief - Battle of the bands (where I first met her), and An Artful Blogger (joke blog). Dixie is an artist, and paints and sketches portraits and landscapes, depending on a client's request, in acrylic, pastel, or charcoal. She does crafting and sewing, specializing in costume design or repair, shabby chic creations, and doll clothes.

Kimberley Cooper (Kim) is married, mid-fifties in age, and lives in the UK, sandwiched between the sea and the South Downs. She works part-time for a local charity and supports her father, who is in his eighties and frail. She's had a couple of short stories published in anthologies, which gives her the confidence to self publish, both short stories, a novella and a novel. There's a second novel on the go, 60,000 words through so far. She loves to read blogs, both on writing and those which give an insight into how other people live their lives.

Laura Roberts is a four-time A to Z Challenge participant (2016 marks #5!), and has published three of her April blog post collections as books. She is also a five-time NaNoWriMo winner and a 3-Day Novelist, and you can read more of her work -- or submit to her annual "Everything I Need to Know About Love I Learned From Pop Songs" anthology -- at Buttontapper.com.

Erica is a veteran with the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. She's been writing short stories and plays since 3rd grade and fell out of it in college. I started this blog to get back into writing. She tells us, "My writing style is rather dark and macabre. In my own opinion my writing style is very Edgar Allan Poe-ish/H.P. Lovecraft-ish." She's "super excited to be a part of the Holton’s Hero team. Every year I’ve participated in the challenge and have come across some pretty fantastic blogs and developed a few awesome virtual relationships. I’m looking forward to cheering ya’ll on and giving you virtual high fives. And I can’t wait to read your posts, get to know you and maybe, just maybe develop a blogger-to-blogger relationship. Sounds kinda creepy huh?"

Elizabeth Los says "My favorite fictional character: Sherlock Holmes - I'd sit next to the library shelves in the Summer and read for hours. My favorite movie is The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951). I play piano, flute and trumpet. I love Beethoven, Mozart, Rachmaninoff, but enjoy film scores by Zimmer, Doyle, Goldmith, Horner, Elfman, Morricone, etc, etc. I could listen for hours and still not get enough. :) Oh, and I write. I've published one novel and a few short stories. I'm currently working on a five book young adult series."

Linda G. Hill says she's first a mother of three wonderful boys, second, a novelist and blogger. She says "I write. I observe. And then I write some more. People and their behaviour fascinate me endlessly. I read. A lot. I love to learn." Linda runs a number of blog hops that I participate in, including Stream of Consciousness Saturday and One-Liner Wednesday.

Shan Jeniah Burton lives a passionately playful life filled with lovely chaos, intertwined with her chef husband and two endlessly fascinating homeschooled children who keep outgrowing their clothes. She is particularly fond of words and dreams, imagery and photography, travel, nature, history, music, and fictional people with green blood and pointed ears. I met her through A Round of Words in 80 Days.

Sneha Sasikumar proudly says she has three beautiful places in India to be called as home: one, the emerald Andaman and Nicobar Islands where she is born and brought up, two the Luscious Kerala which is where her ancestral roots are, and finally the Happening and cool Bangalore where she is settled for the past six years. Techie by profession, dancer by birth, Blogger and doodler by choice and in love with her three tattoos. Sneha lives life on her own terms and is always up to learn new things in life. She follows her heart but doesn't forget to carry the brains along :) When life throws lemons at her she turns it into a lemonade!!!

Michele Truhlik is a writer, blogger and small business entrepreneur. Previously an owner of an advertising agency and a bar, she currently has a dog-sitting business and a jewelry business and is much happier being out of the corporate world. She is also following her calling and is an Animal Chaplain and will be officially credentialed and ordained in 2017. She has been rescuing and adopting greyhounds since 1999 and has been owned by 8 greyhounds.

I'm very honored and grateful to have a group of assistants this talented, decicated, and easy to work with, and hope you'll visit their blogs and get to know them.

A to Z tips - Keeping track of the blogs you visit during the #atozchallenge

Half the fun is the blogging.
The other half is the visiting.

It is basic A to Z etiquette to visit back the people that have visited you and left comments on your blog. In addition, we also recommend visiting a couple of people from the sign-up list every day, to promote blogging friendships and to support each other's work.

But even if you only visit 5 new blogs a day, keeping track of all of them can become daunting. Since the list numbers change over the course of the challenge as inactive blogs and broken links are deleted, simply visiting by number is not always the best way to go.

Here are some other things you can try. I have done them before and they worked for me, but you'll have to try to see which one works for you best:

1. Bookmark your favorites
Create a new folder in your Bookmarks on your browser, and bookmark any blogs you came across that you definitely want to visit again.
(I usually just clicked "Open all bookmarks", got my morning coffee and cereal while the browser loaded them, and then leisurely clicked through them every morning)

2. Follow / sign up
Even better: Sign up for the blog itself! Bloggers love to see their follower numbers go up during A to Z - they tell us that people didn't just walk by, they want to stay to read more. If you see a blog that you definitely want to keep reading, during A to Z and beyond, make sure to click Follow (if they have a Followers gadget), or sign-up for email notifications.

3. Feedly
If you want to take blog-following to a more organized level, create yourself a Feedly account. You can add any blog to it (Wordpress, Blogger or otherwise), organize them by themes, and it will put all of their new posts into one newsfeed you can easily look through.
WARNING: Feedly allows you to read blog posts without actually going to the blog site. Make sure you go to the actual blog and leave a comment there. It's only polite. 

Important reminder: Make sure to visit blogs that are below you on the list. If everyone starts at the top, people towards the end will get a lot less much deserved attention.

A to Z Tips - Creating a signature for the #atozchallenge

Here is a tidbit that you might find useful come April.

Visiting blogs and commenting on them is a huge part of the A to Z experience. And so is visiting back! If you want to make sure that people whose blog you commented on can find you and visit you back easily, it is very useful to have a hyperlink signature at the end of your comment.
Here is how that works:

Fill out this template with your own information:

[Your name or Twitter handle] from

<a href="yourblogaddress">Name of Your Blog</a>

You can add more lines if you have more blogs.
For example, my signature looks like this on code:

@TarkabarkaHolgy from

<a href="http://multicoloreddiary.blogspot.com">The Multicolored Diary</a>

<a href="http://hungarykum.blogspot.com">MopDog</a>

And looks like this when you see it at the end of my comments:

@TarkabarkaHolgy from
The Multicolored Diary
MopDog

IMPORTANT: SAVE YOUR SIGNATURE somewhere where you can easily find it and copy-paste it. Me, I have it saved under Drafts in my Gmail box. Every time I go visiting, I just Copy the code, and then Paste it at the end of my comments.

Also: Some commenting formats, like Disqus, don't read HTML. In those cases, just copy and paste your blog URL. The important thing is to leave an address so people you visited and easily visit you back, without having to sift through your G+ profile or your Blogger lists.

Where to Find Images for your #atozchallenge Posts

If you're like me, you LOVE having beautiful images in your blog posts. The addition of a carefully chosen photo can enhance the understanding of your words or add a funny context to make your blog post even more enticing.

“And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?” 

And since I'm a book reviewer, photos and pictures come easy to me. I can simply download the cover of a book and slap it into my post. It's free to use to promote the author's book. 

See? Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy!

The next easiest way to incorporate photos into your blog is to take them yourself. I'm not a photographer and if I add a photo, it's usually one of my pooch.

Sometimes Bailey cooperates and sometimes he couldn't be bothered with my good-boy treats. So what's a blogger to do when in need of a photo and you lack the resources (or skills) for photos for your blog posts?

You turn to Google. To be sure, copyright infringement is a real thing so you can't go around downloading photos and images and adding them to your posts. You must use copyright-free images. There are plenty of websites around and because I'm a librarian, I've done the research for you! 

You can start with Wikipedia. They maintain a list of public domain resources that are free.

The Library of Congress also maintains resources. Theirs are more historically oriented and take some digging. 

Viintage.com offers stunning beautiful images of old posters and other, well, vintage type images.  I used the word image alot in that sentence did i?  

One of my favorites is morguefile.com which contans photos of just about everything. Some are random photos taken by regular people and some are quite good.  

I just downloaded this beautiful image from pixabay.com 

I could go on but I suspect you're getting the idea. Go to the list at Wikipedia (see above) and check out their resources.

Have fun finding resources! 

There are no bad pictures; that's just how your face looks sometimes.” 

― Abraham Lincoln

A to Z Challenge Theme Reveal Day! #atozchallenge

One of the most burning questions participants ask themselves every year is: "Should I have a theme?" Themes are not mandatory, but definitely fun. They let your visitors know what to expect, and help you create posts that line neatly up from A to Z. They also have an added bonus – they let you participate in a whole separate blogfest!

Three years ago, A to Z participant Mina Lobo started the Theme Reveal, and we thought it was such a great idea that we made it tradition.

Here is how the Theme Reveal Blogfest works:

Sign up on the Linky List below. On Monday, March 21 (TODAY!) reveal your theme on your blog and give us a hint of what to expect from it. Then, once your post is up, use the Linky List to visit all the other blogs announcing their themes.

This is a great opportunity for all of you to get a jump start on your A to Z experience. You can link up with fellow bloggers, scout out and bookmark themes that you look forward to, and lure in wandering participants with your awesome theme. This way, by the time the frenzied posting begins on April 1, you will already have an audience eagerly awaiting your posts.

Be sure to visit others on the list and find some awesome themes!