The 2014 A-Z Blogging Challenge

Taking a deep breath and . . . getting my mind around the fact that I've signed up for the 2014 A-Z Blogging Challenge. Whew. How did that happen??

Blame it on Twitter. Several weeks ago I came across a tweet from a fellow writer announcing she had signed up for the challenge. What challenge? I wondered. (Note to self: Limit wondering. Wondering can be a dangerous pursuit. You never know where it might lead.) Which then meant I had to follow the link that led me to the challenge and to what I now consider my totally insane impulse to sign up.

Here's what the challenge entails: blogging EVERY DAY (other than Sundays) for the month of April. To make things even more, um, challenging, participants must follow an alphabetical order for their posts (A-Z), and with an optional continuous theme. The good news is the organizers suggest writing short posts, somewhere between 100-300 words.

Short posts aside, I'm still asking myself why, oh, why have I done this?

A couple of reasons:  First, although I've been blogging for over five years now, I rarely think of myself as a "blogger." I don't know why, maybe it's because I consider myself a writer first, artist second, and "blogging" sounds too much like a job description. But I am a blogger, and the fact is, I love blogging. 

Secondly, I've always wanted to blog more often than my current schedule of once a week or sometimes less. But usually I'm so busy writing my novel or drawing or cooking or, well, you know, living, that the week disappears before I can get to a second or third post. The blogging challenge might help me to change this--not to write a blog post every day when the month is over (I mean, who'd want to read all that?), but at least a little more frequently.

My chosen theme for the month is My Keeper Books. These are the books I have on my very small bookshelf that are never going to the library donation table, the white elephant gift exchange, or to my best friends--even to borrow (sorry, besties!). But these are the books that I refer to over and over, and that I couldn't imagine living without. Some are decades old, others as new as a few weeks.

I won't be writing reviews or synopses, information that is easily available from Goodreads or Amazon.com. What I will be discussing is why these books matter to me: where they came from, who wrote them, why they are so important I've hauled some of them around the world more than once, and will probably do so again. I'm looking forward to the opportunity to examine the books in a new light and with a fresh purpose, and maybe introduce you to some great titles at the same time.

So that's the plan, starting on Tuesday, April 1 (and that's no joke).

Tip of the Day: Here's an easy way you can play along, too: plan to visit, read, and comment on a blog or two every day during the month of April. There's an entire list right here at the challenge site. See you next week!