Gearing up for another #AtoZChallenge

The A to Z blogging challenge is right around the corner.

For those of you, who haven’t heard about it, the A to Z challenge is a challenge for bloggers to post every day in April (except Sundays). Every day (Monday through Saturday) is matched with a letter of the alphabet. On the first day, you write about a topic that begins with A, the next day B and so on.

Now the organizers suggest you come up with a theme to help you get through the challenge. My first year (2014), I didn’t pick a theme. The next year, I did a theme of TV shows followed by characters in 2016, antagonists in 2017, songs about magic in 2018, character flaws in 2019, comic strips in 2020 and finally cat characters in 2021.

The key is to pick something that you will be able to find something for each letter. There are some hard letters – Q, X and Z in particular.

As a fantasy author, I like to connect my topics to something related to writing (characters/antagonists) or fantasy or magic. Every book I’ve written has had at least one dragon character. I’m not talking about just a dragon in the background the same way you might mention a deer or a horse. These are sentient beings that impact the story. And those are the types of dragon characters I hope to highlight during this challenge though whether I can find 26 examples is yet to be seen.

Those of you who want to know more about the challenge, click here. And you can look for my A to Z challenge posts about dragon characters beginning April 1^st.

Busy with Used Book Sale & Preparing for New Carpet

Well, I had hoped to get back into posting regularly but it hasn’t been happening. I have been busy (as always). So I thought I would show some photos to show you what I have been up to these days.

This is the North East Council of PTA’s Used Book Sale. It is an annual event where local schools in our district collect Used Books, DVDs, CDs, comics, audio books and such for our Council PTA to sell (with the proceeds being divided between participating schools). It is a great literacy event as all those books you see are sold for under $1 each. But as you can imagine, this 3 day event is a lot of work.

In addition to working at the Used Book Sale, I have been getting our house ready for new carpet. We built this house 19 years ago. It still has the original carpet!!! Yes, we have gotten our money’s worth but it sure has needed to be changed for several years. Why haven’t we before this…well, it is all the work it takes packing up all the stuff we have upstairs.

It will all be worth it, I’m sure. And it is giving us a reason to purge some stuff we have had stored in the closets.

And, another thing I have been working on is the A to Z Blogging Challenge which starts in just 10 days. Check out my post on Thursday as I preview my theme for this year.