How to Be One Step Ahead for #atozchallenge

Hello Alphabet Fans,
I have a quick idea I thought I'd share to make life easier come April. Unlike most of the co-hosts, I haven't written and pre-scheduled all of my posts.  I do have a theme, and I do know what I'm doing for each letter, but that's as far as I've gotten.

Maybe that's where you are, too, or maybe you don't have a theme and are just going to go day by day. That's totally cool, too.  Here's how to make it just a bit quicker each day.

Between now and April 1, go put up a draft of each post.  Here are the steps.

1) Download all of Jeremy's amazingly beautiful letters.  I like to start each post with the letter of the day so that visitors know right away that I'm participating, and on the right letter.  They are under the "banner/badges" tab up at the top.  They look like this.

Pretty, eh?

2) Now go to start to write a post in the compose window.  Insert the correct letter.  Put the letter A as your title, or the real title, if you've picked it out.

3) Pre- schedule the post.  Not sure how to pre-schedule?  I wrote a post about it here.

4) Not sure what day to put each letter on?  Under banners/badges there's a desk top calendar you can use, or in the FAQ, there's a simple list of what letter goes with each day.

5) Be sure to save your post.  It will show up in your post list as a draft.  

6) When you've written the post, even if it's days ahead, be sure to push publish.  It will sit and wait until the proper day and time and then magically, you'll wake up and see your post already up, and with comments!  Because you have turned off the evil CAPTCHA, right?

If it's still on, and you should check your settings under comments to make sure, we have a video in the FAQ about how to disable it.  DO IT NOW IF YOU HAVEN'T.

I hope these tips are helpful.  If you have any questions, we are all ready to answer them.  

infoatoz2014@gmail.com

Be patient though, AJ and I are pretty busy, so it might take a few days.  If you're in a hurry for the answer, you can email me, Tina, directly.  My email is in the contact tab.

~Tina, A to Z Team

P.S Do you see how useful those tabs are?  If you haven't read them, please do so.  The info we've put there for you will help you have a great A-Z Challenge!

#atozchallenge -- Stormy the Weather Gnome talks mid-alphabet slump!

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If this is your first year doing the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge, or your fifth, it's easy to get bogged down during the middle of the alphabet.

It's not that M, N, O, and P are boring, it's just that you've been looking at letters for about two weeks and there seems no end in sight!

Well, don't bury your head like an ostrich! 

You must embrace the middle!

You must find your inner motivation!

You must push through those 'sucking you down like quicksand' and 'walking through molasses' letters!


Have a laugh!
 

Have another!

And then, get right back to work!

The end is near!!!!

Getting to Know Your Co-Hosts for #atozchallenge: Tina @ Life is Good

Hi, I'm Tina, the super-shy one on the team.  Ahem.  SO not true.  If you've ever read my blog, Life is Good, you know I'm pretty much an open book.  I have no on-line persona.  I'll talk about anything (and have).  I write embarrassing stories about myself.  I talk about my family, my life, my struggles, fears, hopes and dreams.  

I know some think that doing so is dangerous, that I'm opening myself up for stalking, identity theft.  Kidnapped children.   Have at it people.  You can come take my medical bills, my asthma, my messy house, my struggles with contentment.  You can come finish all the still-in-progress projects at my house.  You won't find much of material value here, and my life is eternal, so if you take my earthly one, well then, it was my time.  I have a strong faith, and though I'm a very bossy, take charge, schedule oriented "let's get this done" type of person, I have no illusions that I have control of my life.  God's in charge.  

I do like the questions, so here you go:

How far in advance do you prepare your theme and complete your A-Z before the Challenge begins? (Yvonne)

Um, I usually don't.  I try to get the first three or so set up, and if I know I'll be out of town, then I'll write the posts for those days.  There are several reasons for this.  One: I'm so stinking busy from January to April with behind the scenes stuff of a co-host, that I don't have the time.  Two: I really like the spontaneity of daily writing, the pressure, the deadline. I know that sounds crazy, but it's totally doable if you have your theme and topics for each letter picked out. So yeah, none of mine are done yet...but I picked my theme in January and have been working on matching the letters and the topics since then.

At the end of a long day…wine? beer?? Walk?? Chocolate?? Pet your pet?? Sex?? (SammyD)

SammyD and I have been getting to know each other.  It started with the info@ email and went from there...so I will not shy away from a question with the word sex in it.  This does not make this question (AC) so feel free to keep reading.

I love wine and beer, I can't walk very far right now because of my severe asthma but it's getting better.  Can't eat chocolate because I'm hypoglycemic.  Can't have pets because of the asthma.  Sex is one of the best stress relievers I know, so at the end of the day, you'll find me with a glass of chardonnay in my hand, and a gleam in my eye ;-)

Do you believe in Sasquatch? (JoJo)

Absolutely.  I also believe we still have some aquatic dinosaurs.  My husband, The Engineer, and my dad, The Swede, and I were on a sailing trip on the Chesapeake Bay.  We each individually saw the head of a plesiosaurus come up and say hi, about a 100 yards away. The Engineer saw it first and asked my dad what it was.  We watched some more.  It came up again. We looked at each other in awe.  We thought maybe we'd had too much sun, but we kept watching and theorizing, and in the end, it was the only conclusion which made sense.  Then The Engineer and I watched a NOVA about dinosaurs and saw what they looked like and it was exactly what we saw.  NOVA said they're still out there.

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I blog at Life is Good, and have had two short stories published.  I'm a columnist for a newsletter, and have been writing my first novel for too long. I'm also the mom of two teenage boys and the wife of a nutty-professor inventor-engineer so life is never dull, nor does it have much free time.  But life IS good.