Shifting Gears to Locate the Hottest (Blog) Spots on A-Z North #atozchallenge #roadtrip

The daily specials provided at this rest stop for the 2014 A-to-Z Road Trip are aimed at helping you navigate this alphabet highway most efficiently; to keep your tires, engine and gas tank in tip top shape. Any of the new blogs we visit can be likened to roadside attractions, complete with fishing lakes, hiking trails, historic parks, ancient monuments, carnival rides, festive games and little souvenir shops offering novelties that visitors can share with their friends. 

So while each road tripper has his or her own map on navigating the A-Z route, which stretches for miles, here are a few additional ways that you can prevent getting lost in deserted towns where “keep out” signs, “out of order” pay phone machines and an undefined substance dominate the atmosphere.

Random Reflections - Try to visit all (or most) of the blogs located on the 2014 A-to-Z Challenge Reflections list during your road trip escapades, if you haven’t done so already.

Since many of the people who wrote reflections for the challenge, these bloggers are also likely to still be active, displaying new blog posts for you to read and comment on.

Social Strategy - Skip the 2014 A-to-Z Challenge Sign-Up List for a day and instead, visit participating #atozchallenge blogs that have been active on Twitter. 

As previously mentioned in a Co-Host Reflections post, this is one way to almost ensure that the blogs you come across will have completed the challenge and are continually blogging about fun and interesting topics, on a regular basis. Many of the tweets posted by bloggers during the challenge contain links to A-Z blog posts they wrote for specific letters of the alphabet, which could be a great way for you to make-up for blog posts that you missed in April. Either way, you can visit these blogs by following the link trail and or discussions within A-to-Z Challenge tweets. One of the easiest ways to do this is by searching the hashtags #atozchallenge as well as #AZchat and, if you’re venturing out into the off-beaten path… #atozroadtrip.

How Many Blogs have YOU visited as of this 3^rd Week in May, during the 2014 A-to-Z Road Trip?

Have an awesome Memorial Day weekend, everyone!

About the Author:

Nicole Ayers makes movies while also writing about independent film directors and their work at The Madlab Post. She is currently celebrating high school proms and graduations of family and friends; thus, may be offline throughout the greater part of the Memorial Day holiday weekend, but wish you all well.

The one-stop shop for all your Trickster needs!

It is the 3rd Wednesday of the month already, and as promised, the Storytelling Series continues. With Tricksters!
Tricksters are all the rage these days. They are unkillable, unforgettable, and we can't help but love them. From an author's point of view, they are extremely hard to write, and even harder to write well. But when they are done the way they should be, they. Rock. The. World.
I have recently posted on my blog StorySpotting about Tricksters done right in contemporary movies and TV shows - you can find the list here. Today, for inspiration, I'll introduce you to some of the stars in traditional Tricksterdom. They are the storyteller's best friend; there is no audience, however old, young, tired, unwilling, or hopped up on candy, that does not love a good Trickster tale. They saved my bacon countless times, on and off the stage.
Let's see some of the big guns:

Ananse
The Spider. Originally from West Africa (Akan and Ashante folklore), he made his way over to the Caribbean and the Americas. According to legend, owns all the stories in the world. Constantly hungry, not above stealing and cheating, endowed with serious balls. The latter is not a metaphor. Married to Aso, who is pretty much the only person who can out-smart him. Find stories here. Also, check out Neil Gaiman's The Anansi Boys.

Sun Wukong
Better known in English as the Monkey King; the undisputed main hero of the Chinese epic Journey to the West. Immortal, invulnerable, invincible, still a monkey. Crossed his name out of the Book of Death, stole the Peaches of Immortality from Heaven, scared the stuffing out of the Dragon Kings. Deity of Blunt Force Trauma. Turned Buddhist. Stars in Chinese, Japanese and Western movies and TV shows. All. The freaking. Time.

Mouse Deer
Also known as Sang Kancil, the resident Trickster of Indonesia. Tiny, smart, thinks fast on his scrawny little feet. Strong contestant for the title of "weirdest creature" in Tricksterdom. But do not be fooled: Mouse Deer, in my experience, is the uncontested favorite of many audiences (including, surprisingly, teenagers).

Loki
Seriously, I'm not going to introduce Loki. Duh. Move along.

Coyote
One of the greatest Tricksters in the Western hemisphere, Coyote pops up in several American Indian cultures. Unkillable, wily, foolish; known for stealing the fire, among many other things. The original inventor of "dancing with the stars." Find a lovely collection of Coyote tales here. Also, you want to read Christopher Moore's Coyote Blue.

Puck
Remember the little guy from Midsummer Night's Dream? Yep, that's a Trickster. Also known as Robin Goodfellow. Half human, half fae. Completely out of control.

Jack
The one and only. Hero of hundreds of Appalachian Jack tales, killer of giants, navigator of flying ships, climber of beanstalks, challenger of Death, ravager of other people's property. Young, cheeky, with serious attitude.

And then some...
Believe me, I can go on about Tricksters until someone duct tapes my mouth shut. Raven. Iktomi. Nanabush. Kitsune. Tanuki. Reynard the Fox. Ti Malice. Nasreddin Hodja. Every culture has one. Some of them have more. But if I listed all of them, where would be the fun of discovery?
Go forth, and find your Trickster.

As usual, you can find Csenge at her blogs:
The Multicolored Diary (Adventures in Storytelling)
MopDog - The crazy thing about Hungarians...
or on Twitter: @TarkabarkaHolgy
or you can buy her book, Tales of Superhuman Powers, which incidentally also features tricksters. Go figure.

Is Planning Now for the 2015 A to Z Too Soon?

Hello everyone. My name is Tim Brannan. I blog over at The Other Side where I primarily talk about games, RPGs and horror.  I am a game author so I use my blog as a platform to talk about my books, but also to share with others in my blogging community to sorts of things I like to write about.

I have been writing material for games nearly as long as I have been playing them.  I started in 1979 and my first "custom class" was a Healer. And....I am not afraid to admit my first new monster I ever wrote up was a "Smurf". Yeah. I was 10.  My first witch class was written sometime between 1985 and 1986.

This was my fourth year of doing the A to Z Challenge on the Other Side. I have also done it one year on my Atheism blog, The Freedom of Nonbelief and another year at Red Sonja She-devil with a Sword, a shared blog dedicated to the comic book character Red Sonja.  Plus I have guest-posted here before on how to use the A to Z challenge in your own writing efforts and the importance of having a theme to your posts.

One would have thought I would have been more prepared this year!

At some point in February I was still planning on doing an A to Z theme on Vampires.  I had started the posts last year when I did Demons. I had an idea for a book about vampires and I thought it would have been a good way to do some research.  It was. Till I shifted midstream.

My newest book is now at Kickstarter to get funding for art and printing.  "Strange Brew: The Ultimate Witch & Warlock" is, well, the most complete guide to playing a witch in the Pathfinder game.  A bit of background.  Back in 2000 the 3rd edition of Dungeons & Dragons hit the shelves with the "Open Gaming Licence" which briefly meant 3rd party authors could make their own books for D&D and not get sued or anything like that.  If you followed the admittedly simple rules of the Open Game Licence then you could do it.  Well I did and in 2003 I released "Liber Mysterium: The Book of Witches & Warlocks".  A friend of mine released a similar book for witches called "Way of the Witch". We liked each other books and we were happy.  2013 rolls around and this friend, Christina, decides it is time we mixed our books together with the newest version of the D&D 3rd edition game, Pathfinder (it's not exactly, but close enough).  We added in the Pathfinder witch and some others and decided to kick start it as a project.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/962794554/strange-brew-pathfinder-the-ultimate-witch-and-war

So far things are going great!  But my extra writing time was taking a solid hit.  I have 13 years worth and thousands of pages of notes and material to go through.

So to save some time I switched over to the A to Z of Witches.

It was a good idea.  Go through notes, post ideas as they come to me.  I only managed to stay about 10 days ahead of schedule and that was nowhere near enough.  So much for my own advice about theme and planning!

I got a lot of great posts up and in fact have enough for another couple months of solid witch postings.   I got to participate in a "mini-hop" of people doing supernatural creatures during the A to Z as well and that was the best!  I have to give very special thanks to Tasha (Tasha's Thinkings) and Sophie (Sophie's Thoughts and Fumbles) for helping me with the idea and then doing all the heavy lifting afterwards.  THEY, and everyone in the Supernatural mini-hop, really made this A to Z special for me.

If you look at my May 5th post I state I survived the A to Z challenge.  Survived is the right word. Not beat, not won, but survived.  Yes I posted everyday and still got in some of my other posts. Yes I visited my neighbor blogs, but didn't always comment on them.  Yes the material I wrote will find a home somewhere in Strange Brew.

But, I didn't get to interact with other bloggers as much as I wanted. I didn't visit every blog on the list like I have in years past.  And while I noticed that I was getting a good amount of traffic from the Supernatural A to Z and from the A to Z site itself, my regular readers dropped off.  So in that respect I didn't do as well as I would have liked.

I write about games.  That is who I am and what my readers want.  I tried to keep the topics I posted very relevant to gamers, but also to the non-gamers.  Most people in the world don't care if some beastie has 5 HD or 15 HD, you just want to know how tough it is. To gamers that is a big deal. It's a big deal to me.

I love doing the A to Z and I am taking my own advice to heart and starting my 2015 posts this summer.  I am still considering doing vampires. So to make it work there needs to be plenty of material for gamers (what we in the RPG biz call "crunch") and plenty of narrative material enjoyed by everyone else (what we call "fluff").

So what is my plan?

• Start my post writing early.  Crunch takes longer to write than Fluff. I'll need the time.
• Keep enough crunch to keep my regular readers happy. Especially if it something new.
• Keep the fluffy interesting to keep the A to Zers coming back.
• Visit and interact with more of the bloggers in the A to Z. If I write all my posts this should be easier.
• I would LOVE to participate in another mini-hop like I did this year. That was awesome.

Looking forward to it!

About the Author 
Timothy S. Brannan is the author of The Other Side blog, http://timbrannan.blogspot.com/
He has worked on a number of games including the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG", and is the author of “The Ghosts of Albion RPG”, “The Witch”, “Eldritch Witchery” and the upcoming “Strange Brew” which is currently in a Kickstarter Campaign. Please stop by and see if this is something you would like to support.