Thoughts on Blogging & Upcoming Events

I’ve been a busy bee the last few days. I have a lot of things going on in the blog’verse these days, so I have to do a lot of planning.

For instance, I’ve been prepping my schedule of Horror stories that I will be writing over at Promptly Written in February. I am 3/4s done and will finish up the last remaining week’s story preps tomorrow.

In April, I will be participating in the A-to-Z Challenge. Last year I completed the challenge okay, but I wasn’t able to read very many other participating blogs, not even during the Road Trip afterwards. It’s time consuming and a lot of the participating blogs are via Blogger. If you’ve never visited many Blogger blogs, you have no idea how aggravating they can be. Here are a few issues I have with them:

• Many of the blogs there are heavy with content that takes forever to load. I am not talking about their posts either. I am talking about all the crazy things they add to their sidebars. Just because you *can* add things, doesn’t mean you should! It may make your page pretty, but you aren’t thinking about your readers much when you add all of that crap to your sidebars. This bit of advice goes for WordPress users too *winks*
• A lot of them will add every social media site that they belong to for you to join, but not add a “follow via email” to their sites (I’ve found this on WordPress sites too. So if you want non-WP users to follow your blog, this is a must! Just saying…). This forces me to bookmark their blogs and although I have a special folder for these blogs in my bookmarks, unfortunately, they will also be the last blogs I will read and only when I get a spare moment to read them, which won’t be often in April as I will be doing two challenges that month.
• And the biggest bummer for me over at Blogger sites – when you go to comment on someone’s blog, Blogger usually (almost always!) won’t accept my WordPress ID so I have to use my Google ID which is linked to Blogger. This means that I have to have a Blogger account and blog which will redirect Blogger users to my WordPress account. That makes for a lot of additional clicking and prevents me from getting as much traffic over at my blog. Yes, that sucks majorly and is anti-productive to doing one of these challenges in the first place.

I have made it my goal to follow every single participant from the Challenge though. So far, there are over 500 participants (I’ve only added 100 so far) and by April that will probably quadruple. So seriously, Blogger people, there is a chance you will end up in the Bookmarked Folder and it may be later in the year before I get around to reading your Challenge posts, which will also make things difficult because a lot of Blogger blogs don’t list ARCHIVES either!

So, what else have I been up to lately? Trying to catch up with the blogs that I already follow, read their posts, leave comments, and try to reblog as often as possible.

I did say that I wanted 2016 to be a year of Abundance and it is already beginning to be quite an abundant year! Okay, time to get to reading some blogs so that in a few hours I can kick back and watch the last few episodes of the last season of True Blood!

#joyfuljan – Day Thirty

For today’s #joyfuljan, I find joy in remembering and honoring my mother.

If she was still with us, my mother would be 71 today. A beautiful blue urn sits upon the TV unit which holds her ashes. A picture of her in her late teens or early 20s sits next to it and angels surround both the picture and the urn. I have lit a candle there that will burn all day to honor her.

I haven’t always had joyous reasons to celebrate my mother. We had a rocky relationship and I had been angry with her for years, before and after her passing. I’d like to think that I’ve grown enough spiritually though to let that anger go and remember her for the gifted and talented woman that she was.

My mother could cook anything. She would whip up concoctions with whatever she had handy. She was also an amazing baker and made the best cakes, rolls, and candies. Later in life, she discovered that she could paint and there are ceramics all over the house that display her gorgeous talent. She was also a great storyteller and I’d like to think that this is where my interest and talent in writing stemmed from.

Happy Birthday, Mother. I miss you and love you and rejoice in you this day!

What are you joyful about today? Let me know in the comments.

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Throughout the month of January, I will be celebrating Joyful January with Satya and Kaspa over at Writing Our Way Home