IMPORTANT INFORMATION

The 2024 OFFICIAL MASTER LIST: https://tinyurl.com/w54yupwe

Friday, October 17, 2014

#atozchallenge #roadtrip -- Stormy meets some NEW friends!



 Hi!
It's ME!

Stormy the Weather Gnome!



We're changing things up a bit so you don't get bored.

Don't worry, we're still on the road to nowhere, still can't drive 55, AND still running against the wind.


Pam Margolis from An Unconventional Librarian.

Pam's A to Z theme...of course...BOOKS! Books for the Middle Grade reader. So many fun, exciting, and interesting titles.

Old books, new books, award-winning books! More books than you can shake a stick at!
Go check them out!

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And now, for some NEW friends!

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C. Lee Mckenzie from The Write Game

This was a very inventive theme and probably a giant pain in the ass to pull off!
 
The Write Game's Theme AtoZ Blog Challenge
2014 - Stuff I Learned or Laughed at from Bloggers in the 2013 A to Z Challenge.
 
Each day C. Lee would give clues to a mystery blogger and everyone had to guess who it was! Lots of fun watching who would guess first and guess correctly!
 
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S.L. Hennessy from Pensuasion


S.L.'s A to Z theme was fairy tales, inspired in great part by some of her current favorite TV shows, movie adaptations, and books.

Just to name a few! G is for Grimm. N is for The Neverland. U is for Ugly Stepsisters. W is for Wolves and Witches. And of course...Z is for Zombie Princess.

Did someone say Zombie Gnome?

Thanks for visiting with us today!
Are you finding any great blogs on your trip?

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Why Show Up?

I'm amazed every year during November when so many writers take on the challenge of NaNoWriMo. Challenge is the correct word as they attempt to write a novel in a month. Reading their tortured posts and updates on social media makes me wince in sympathy. 50,000 words in one month is hard work and some do it year after year. I gave some tips on succeeding at NaNo on Monday.

In April, thousands of bloggers will sign up for the A to Z Blogging Challenge. 2015 will be my fourth year and I couldn't be more excited. But honestly, after that first year I wasn't sure I would ever take it on again. It's work. But then my blogger friends were doing in, some of them running it, and I took the plunge again. I had learned some things the first year and the second year there was as much fun as there was work. I met so many wonderful bloggers outside the novel writing community and learned from them. My third year, I served as a Minion to Alex J. Cavanaugh and gained another perspective on the massive effort that is A to Z and appreciation for the people who started it and keep it running.

Some things I learned is that blogging isn't just about book promotion or 'building my platform.' And participating in the A to Z blog isn't just about growing my blog readership. It's about being part of a community. A welcoming community who offer understanding, advice and opportunities.

I blog three times per week at my personal blog, Susan Says, and take turns on the IWSG blog as well as occasionally at The Susquehanna Writers blog. And now you'll see me on this blog once or twice per month, one of those wonderful opportunities I mentioned. Like those taking on the work involved in NaNoWriMo, there are good reasons to show up and keep at it. Whatever your motivations for blogging, joining hops, posting regularly and being part of a community, you have to show up and work at it. I'm thrilled to show up here and be part of this team.

Why do you show up to blog on a regular basis? Are there days when it feels more like work than fun? Has blogging become easier for you with experience?

Susan Gourley writes science fiction romance and epic fantasy. She blogs at Susan Says, has a Facebook page and Tweets as Susan Kelley. This is her first post as a new member of the A to Z team.




Monday, October 13, 2014

Themes That Rocked - Historical Travels with Carrie-Anne Brownian!

Today we welcome Carrie-Anne Brownian, author of historical fiction set mostly in Europe and Asia. The locations and towns she featured were truly amazing and a great lesson in history and geography.

Your theme this year was geographical-historical locations in your books – what made you decide on that theme?

I felt like it might be more accessible to a wider range of readers, with more obvious interest than my prior two themes, characters I’ve created and chapters I’ve written. Not everyone is so interested in a theme revolving around someone’s writing, but many people are interested in travel. I’m also a Sagittarius, known as the Traveler of the Zodiac.

What city or location was your favorite?

I think my favorites were Kutaisi, Georgia, and Isfahan, Iran, both beautiful cities which have been continuously inhabited for thousands of years. I’m very eager to visit both of them someday, and to see beautiful places like the Bagrati Cathedral and River Rioni of Kutaisi, and Isfahan’s breathtaking Grand Bazaar and Khaju Bridge. It also meant a lot to me to positively feature two Iranian cities, since my family were dear friends with an Iranian family when I was growing up, and I know from my own experience that these are good, intelligent, modern, hospitable people, not xenophobic terrorists.

What letter proved the most difficult?

In terms of finding a wide sample of pictures to use, the most difficult letters were U (Uelen, Russia), O (Odžaci, Serbia), A (Abony, Hungary), and F (Fereydunshahr, Iran). In terms of finding a wide variety of information about the cities, A, O, and F were also among the most difficult letters, and V (Vratsa, Bulgaria) also proved to have somewhat of a dearth of in-depth information available. Many people have problems with X, but once I found the two cities I wanted to use (Xánthi, Greece, and Xanten, Germany), I was overwhelmed with both pictures and information.

Emotionally, the most difficult letter was Z (Zagreb, Croatia), whose post I put off and wrote very last of all. Croatia committed massive war crimes against Serbs, Jews, and Roma during World War II, to such a degree that even the Nazis found them too sadistic. And many modern Croatians have celebrated or downplayed those atrocities. That shouldn’t be swept under the rug. However, I had to keep thinking of Ivan Vranetić, a young Croatian who rescued many people (including his future wife) because it was his second nature to do the right thing, and of my characters Zvonko and Mirsada. Entire peoples are not evil.

Yerevan, Armenia was fascinating – have you been there? Want to travel there?

At the moment, the only countries outside the U.S. I’ve been to are Israel and Austria (and I was only in Austria physically, due to an emergency middle of the night plane landing for a sick passenger). Someday I’d love to see Yerevan, one of the world’s oldest continually inhabited cities. I only hope I can make myself understood, since the bits and pieces of Armenian I’ve taught myself over the years are Western Armenian, and Armenia’s national language is Eastern Armenian. There are a number of important differences between them, beyond the pronunciation of some letters.

You did a lot of research for your posts – what were some of your sources?

Some of them were sources I’d used before for my writing, and I referred back to old print-outs or had to hunt them down again. I know the place I tracked down the information from some of my print-outs on Lille, France wasn’t where I’d gotten it from in 2002, but at least it had been transferred to a different website in the years since. I also used Jewish Virtual Library for information on a number of my cities, such as Dushanbe, Tajikistan, and Xánthi, Greece.

I know this is generally frowned on in serious research, but I used Wikipedia as a jumping-off point in a number of instances. It’s important to follow the links to outside, more scholarly sources, which in turn often leads you to other good sources of information. Many cities also had official websites for tourism or about their histories.


During your research, what surprised you the most?

One of the big surprises was finding out how some of these cities had been destroyed, sometimes more than once. With some cities, such as Tartu, Estonia, there isn’t much left of the historic buildings, due to so many fires and so much warfare. And yet these people kept rebuilding.


What was it like visiting Israel?

It’s truly a land of miracles and wonders, where old coexists with new, and every stone is steeped with deep, rich history and stories. My three favorite places are the Old City of Jerusalem, with its thousands of years of history and so many different cultures; Haifa, Israel’s best-integrated city, where members of all five of the country’s major religions live together peacefully; and the Galilee, an idyllic, peaceful, generally quiet region.

What theme do you think you’ll tackle for next year’s Challenge?

It’s once again going to be a theme related to my writing, but not directly related. It deals with one of my areas of greatest historical expertise, and two of the subjects I’ll be featuring were discussed during this year’s Challenge. I also included photographs related to a few of the other subjects to be featured. As a final hint, it’s going to include subjects from places including Bulgaria, Armenia, Ireland, Albania, and Bosnia.

Awesome! Look forward to your posts, Carrie-Anne.


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