U is for UNDAUNTED!

Counting today, there are six more posts to be done for this year's A to Z Challenge, those for the letters U through Z. If you've kept up with the official calendar, great! I'm sure most of you got all your entries done and have them showing up on your blog automatically, on autopilot. There are others that are writing two or three days in advance, and even a few hardy souls who are getting the entries written and posted the day they're due.

This is for the rest of you, the ones who are stuck and maybe even falling behind:

Be undaunted! Stick with it! The only way you can fail now is by giving up. Regardless of the roadblocks you've faced this month, you can finish. And you're going to do great.

Stuck on a letter? It'll come to you. Move on to another one. Go back to the beginning and re-read all you've written, and see what suggests itself to you. Start writing down words that start with the letter, and see if you can find a word that can be made to fit your theme. Read what others have written for that letter. Go old school and pull out the dictionary, the thesaurus, the New York City Business-to-Business telephone directory, the good ol' World Book Encyclopedia. Turn it on its head.

You've done too much great work on this challenge to give up now. Your readers are all rooting for you. Hang in there!

Throwback Thursday #AtoZChallenge style!

When I realized that the letter T fell on a Thursday this year I KNEW I had to do a Throwback Thursday (#TBT) post for you all!

So I asked all the co-hosts to send me a link to their very first A post for the Challenge. It's fun to see how long we all have been participating - turns out 2012 was a good crop year for co-hosts - and also how our topics (and comments!) have changed. Click on our links below to take a step back in time!

Check 'em out:
Arlee Bird @ Tossing it Out 
Ninja Captain Alex J. Cavanaugh 
Jeremy @ Hollywood Nuts 
Nicole Ayers @ The Madlab Post 
Author Stephen Tremp (Due to a catastrophic SPAM battle with Google, Steve only has his A post from last year :( But we promise he's been around awhile!)
Heather M. Gardner 
AJ Lauer 
Pam @ An Unconventional Librarian 
Matthew MacNish @ The QQQE
Zalka Csenge Virág @ The Multicolored Diary and MopDog 
S. L. Hennessy @ Pensuasion 
C. Lee McKenzie @ The Write Game 
Joy Campbell @ The Character Depot 
Susan Gourley @ Susan Says 
John Holton @The Sound of One Hand Typing 
Lisa Buie-Collard, Author 

I was going to post the #1 single on the charts on April 1, 2010 but it was a song by Rihanna and I made y'all suffer through twerking last week so I didn't think it would be nice to do that to you again :)

And also because it's T and this fits into the Throwback theme, Tina's post welcoming me to Tina's Terrific Team in 2013 after she cajoled me into giving her an embarrassing childhood photo... <3

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Have you checked out our new A-Z merch?

Our hero Amy has made it through 19 crazy letters of the alphabet - will you help her make it through the last 6? Stop by to help her decide what to do!

S is for Signatures!

It came up in the Twitter chat the other day that we should talk about signatures. I know we have left the halfway point behind, but it is something that can still be useful for your remaining visits, and also for the reflections and road trips after A to Z is over!

Signatures are links to your own blog or website that make it easy for people to re-visit you after you comment on their blog. If you don't have one, people have to click on your name, and that either takes them to your Google+ profile, or your Blogger profile (or nowhere at all).

Is that a bad thing?
Well, if you are like me, and have multiple blogs (and not all of them are in the Challenge), there is nothing telling people on your Blogger profile what they should be clicking on. If you don't share your posts on G+, once again, it seems like a dead end to visitors. If you comment on blogs anonymously, you are essentially invisible.
And here is the thing:

We WANT to visit you back!

Visiting back is common courtesy during A to Z. You might not have the time every day to do it, but it is polite to catch up and visit back whenever you get the chance. Leaving sigs in comments also brings new people to your site!

In order to make it easier for people to visit you, you are encouraged to leave a clickable link to your blog at the end of your comment.
You can just copy-paste your blog's URL if you want to.

But if you want to be even more smooth, elegant and helpful, you can create a signature.

Signatures are HTML coded, which means they show up as clickable links. Mine looks like this:

@TarkabarkaHolgy from
Multicolored Diary - Epics from A to Z
MopDog - 26 Ways to Die in Medieval Hungary

In the HTML code, it looks like this:

@TarkabarkaHolgy from

<a href="http://multicoloreddiary.blogspot.com">Multicolored Diary</a> - Epics from A to Z

<a href="http://hungarykum.blogspot.com">MopDog</a> - 26 Ways to Die in Medieval Hungary

You can just copy and paste it, and swap the links and titles for your own!

Make sure you save it somewhere handy (I have it as a Draft in my Gmail box) so you don't have to re-type it every time you go on a visiting binge! You can just Copy and Paste, easy peasy.

Most commenting systems allow HTML, which means your sig will show up nice and clickable. Some might make it show up like the second example (Google+ does that sometimes) but the links are still clickable, and that's what matters.

Happy Visiting!