#atozchallenge #roadtrip - Stormy stares at himself in his rear view mirror.

 

And I'm too sexy for your party
Too sexy for your party
No way I'm disco dancing
I'm a model you know what I mean

 

(I'm Too Sexy - Right Said Fred)

Welcome to leg six of the Post A-to-Z Road Trip!


Stormy the Weather Gnome and I are going to try to hit at least 20 new blogs a week from the Challenge list and tell you about a few of them in each of my posts.

When you go visit these awesome blogs, please make sure you tell them that you're visiting on the Post A to Z Road Trip!


And I'm too sexy for my hat
Too sexy for my hat
What do you think about that?
I'm a model you know what I mean

I can't forget out ... well .... ME!

Here are some of my best looks from my three years of April A to Z blogging!

 
I'm too sexy for my love
Too sexy for my love
Love's going to leave me
And I'm too sexy for this song



Thanks for visiting with us today!
Are you finding any great blogs on your trip?

What Helps You Blog Better?

Hey everyone. It is me, Tim Brannan from The Other Side, again!  I am a Role-Playing 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.  So RPGs, horror and geek-culture.

Often times when we write about writing in general and blogging in particular we talk a lot about where ideas come from, how to get more readers or even how much writing everyday is important.  This is all true, and important, but that is not the type of tools I mean today.

Hardware

Look down.  There. See it, it's your keyboard.  What is your relationship with your keyboard?

I blog every day.  I write in addition to that and there is that day job too.  I spend a lot of time with my fingers on my keyboard.  My favorite keyboard is the one I have at home, the Microsoft Wireless Laser Desktop 6000. It is the silver one and long, long out of stock.  I wrote Ghosts of Albion on it and it is by far the most comfortable keyboard I have ever used.  I never expected to find a replacement for my old beatup Gateway 2000 124 key programmable keyboard, but this one is fantastic.

Here is my main computer, Frankencomputer (I built it from spare parts).  It's not much more than a web-machine and word processor which is what I want when I am writing.  The keyboard is actually worth more to me than the rest of the computer.  If I am going to sit and pound away on a keyboard then it needs to be comfortable to me.

This is my second 6000 keyboard in truth.  I bought this one off of eBay for an ungodly price and still consider it money well spent.  It has the right curve for my hands and can elevate to the right height so I don't get fatigue while typing. Plus it is the same keyboard Weird Al has in his song "White & Nerdy".  A song that is not about me at all. Really. Honest.

Software

I was reading the other day that George R. R. Martin, when he is not plotting to kill every character you love, sits in front of his old DOS machine and types his books into WordStar 4.0.  Piers Anthony once mentioned that back in the day he paid a programmer to reverse engineer his favorite word processor from CP/M to MS-DOS. Laurel K. Hamilton did her first writing on a manual typewriter and still thinks of things in terms of page counts and not word counts.  I am sure there are many more examples, but the point is clear. We get used to something for our writing and we like to stick with it.   Myself, I am an Microsoft Word fan.  I have been using it for years, since version 1.1 and Office 4.3.  I have gotten very comfortable with it and have lost count of the number of hours I have spent in it.

So then am I switching over to Google Drive?
Well while I still use Word one of the things it promised and never really delivered on was real time collaboration.   With the Google Drive word processor I can work with others and see their edits real time. We can chat and discuss what it is we are doing and why.  Plus I have lost count of the number of docs I have lost carting them from one computer to another, either on floppy disk or flash drive. And then when I manage to get it to another computer (say from work to home) I have to deal with whether or not the computer can read the file format and version control.  The only thing worse than loosing a document is to spend hours adding to a draft that is already 3 revisions old.

So how about you?
What are your writing needs? Special keyboard? Software? Maybe it is your best comfy chair.

Tell us all about it.

--
Like what I do?
Let me know by voting for me for "Best Blog" in the 2014 ENnie Awards for Role-Playing Games.
http://www.ennie-awards.com/vote/
Go to Best Blog and put a "1" next to "The Other Side". Thanks so much!
Voting ends on July 30.

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.

Related articles

• How to use the #atozchallenge to help your writing efforts
• 2014 ENnies interview #2: The Outer Side
• Where do you create?
• 2014 ENnies Nominees

Themes That Rocked! Hauntings with Lexa Cain

Please welcome the awesome Lexa Cain, author of Soul Cutter.

You posted about hauntings for the Challenge – what made you choose that theme?

When Julie Flanders was releasing her novel, THE GHOSTS OF AQUINNAH, she did a bunch of blog posts and guest posts about haunted places. I loved those! I was sorry to see them end, so I did my part to take up where she left off.

I think many readers assumed I believe in ghosts and that’s why I did the posts. That isn’t true -- I just adore a good ghost story and like to wonder, “What if…?”

When searching for hauntings, which one surprised you the most?

All of them surprised and intrigued me! Sometimes I came across several for one letter and had a tough time choosing which one to write about.

Which letter was the most difficult?

“X” and “Z” were the hardest, but I’m pretty sure everyone had the same problem, and we all just did the best we could.

What country or area seemed to have the most hauntings?

I think the US had the most hauntings, but I think that’s probably because Americans really enjoy that kind of stuff and promote it. America even has a bunch of reality TV shows devoted to haunted places, mediums, psychics, debunking sightings, etc.

Where did you come across Kutna Hora's 'Bone' church?

I honestly can’t recall. I was surfing the net like the baddest big wave rider ever and whooshed through a lot of sites! All I know is when I stumbled across Kutna Hora -- it freaked me out! Of course, I had to include it. I put up several pictures because the sight of all those bones turned into furniture and chandeliers was just unbelievable!

Did you use any sites or just Google to find the haunted places?

Both. There are a ton of sites that have articles on haunted places. Most only detail hauntings in the US, but some have international places too.

Have you ever been to any of the places you featured?

No, although several people made comments on my blog about visiting the places I wrote about. None had supernatural encounters though. (And they sounded disappointed that they didn’t. lol)

If you participate in the Challenge next year, do you have a theme in mind?

No, but luckily, there’s a lot of time left for me to think about it.

I’m sure it will be just as cool as your theme this year. Thanks, Lexa!


Co-host Ninja Captain Alex J. Cavanaugh is the author of Amazon best-sellers CassaStar, CassaFire, and CassaStorm, and his blog can be found HERE