If you have not been following this blog for the last month of April, I have been participating in the A-Z Challenge in which participants write alphabetically on a topic of their choosing. Writing is only half the story – with some 218 participants, the idea is to read the blogs of old friends and newcomers alike and if you don’t manage to do that during April, then the Roadtrip that follows in May is the chance to see what everybody else has been up to…
Ronel the Mythmaker besides being the splendid Graphic Designer who furnished the A-Z Challenge 2024 with all its banners and letters this year, Ronel is a writer whose books deal with the Fae or fairy world and for her own A-Z this year, she has given us as compendious a guide to all the forms of the Fae in world folklore. Ronel lives in South Africa and I find it hard to imagine that in that land of bright sunshine and big skies, there lives a soul whose fascination with the Fae, have led her to explore the often dark side of folklore but that she has! Everything you might want to know about the creatures of the Fae but never dared to ask… As well as her writing and graphics, Ronel is a mistress of the dark arts of all digital media including sound, and illustrates her posts copiously, including the one I have linked to – Dark Fae: Ghouls…
By Sarah is a blog by Sarah Whiley from Australia and she must post late at night for she often pops up in my Jetpack app just as I, am getting up. She posts poems and photographs each of which, incrementally reveals the character and life of the eponymous Sarah. I don’t always comment on her posts some, like the photograph below for “Wordless Wednesdays” do not require an answer, but often a comment has followed hard on the heels of Sarah posting – winging its way from and to the antipodes by the miracle of modern technology. Sarah has become part of my life and her photographic theme for A-Z 2024 was about corners – corners of things and things found in corners – dip into Sarah’s quirky view of the world…
The Multicoloured Diary is a blog by Zalka Csenge Virág Storyteller from Hungary and is another one dealing with Folklore from around the world. I enjoyed Zalka’s previous A-Zs so this was like connecting with an old friend. This year the theme was Romance tropes in Folklore and like Ronel, Zalka is compendious in her research and posting – despite the fact that she had family issues pulling at her, Zalke finished the challenge in flying form once more…
I try to ration myself for prompts, perturbed by the idea that I will be swallowed in an endless cycle of call and response, but one that I will not miss each month, is 6 Degrees of Separation. Starting from a given title, each reader of books – no matter when they read them, summons six links to form a chain that finally links from and back to the beginning book.
I confess I do not make enough time for reading books, words bound between covers on paper as opposed to screens, though I always have one novel and at least one non-fiction on the go – however slow. I confess that the Poets Pub is often the guilty party in keeping me from the books though I do not blame or object because beautiful, moving or informative as books are, the pleasure of company and connection are better still.
I’m afraid my To Be Read list rarely coincides with the 6 Degrees prompt and only sometimes am I moved to purchase the recommendation, but recently I fell hook line and sinker for Time Shelter. The book is a metaphorical creation of memory clinics where sufferers from certain kinds of memory loss may steep themselves – full-immersion – in a room recreating an era from their past and get the backroads to their lost memories cleared of debris. A few weeks or months in which a loved one comes to life again is worth so much to relatives grieving the loss of someone who is still alive…
Dear Readers – I bought the book! I have no regrets and I recommend it even to poets – no! especially to poets so they may dive into a novel length metaphorical fiction that explores memory and loss, health and sickness and if that sounds depressing, I assure you that Time Shelter, by Georgi Gospodinov is most entertainingly told – and now your turn to confess – when is the last time you read a fiction by a Bulgarian?
For my own version of the Road Trip that follows the A2Z Challenge each year, I like to visit other blogs and then post a review of several together – here goes…
Each Year I have participated, I have had some commenters from India which is always a thrill because it feels like I am truly part of a global village and not just a US/UK English speaking bubble! This year there were three new readers, and in her “W” post, Afshan Shaik revealed why that was.
We created a whatsapp group just for 2022 A to Z challenge, and the group is a backbone to me whenever I feel like quitting the challenge. We pushed each other and finally have reached the last leg of the challenge. The group helped me with ideas and boosted me when I felt the heat of challenge. I am voice typing most of my posts of the last leg of challenge due to my ailments and the group is the only reason – I am able to continue the challenge. Our group members are:
So three of this list regularly came to visit, comment and contribute ideas and recipes so I thought I would start my road trip by properly visiting these friends to a depth I did not manage during the challenge due to having to pants most of the posts…
Afshan Shaik whose blog is The Pensive, was a frequent visitor and it was from her post on “What’s happening on WhatsApp?”, that I learned of the above Whatsapp group and realised that I knew several of the names. Now some bloggers tell you about their lives and yet do not succeed in conveying who they are as a person – Afshan is not one of those – whether she is writing about “covidiots”, Indian politics, the problems with trying to feed her beloved daughter or the nature of blogging, you are being treated to Afshan’s personality and good humour, her passions and the things that make her angry. Afshan has a maid, which for people in the UK, is a luxury reserved for the very rich, but I guess in India, it is a way of trickling down earnings to people who need it and is quite normal for many people in India. Interesting then to read of Afshan’s having to take up her maid’s duties – one senses a greater appreciation of the maid, during the lockdown, and on the other hand, her amazement at just how stratified the servants were in Downton Abbey, which she reviews for “D”. I urge you to make the acquaintance of this lively minded young mother…
Jayashree of Jayashree Writes, offers us a guide to her favourite (or whatever fits the letter of the day) Indian food. A software writer, she’s lived in America and Singapore since venturing from her native India, which has no doubt cross-pollinated her cooking! Certainly, she has embraced Tofu since living in Singapore, but the dishes she offers in the A2Z are classic and not too stretching in either skills or ingredients, so most people could enjoy them – I know I am going to…
I had a comment from Anuradha of “Mom and Ideas” on my very first post of the A2Z Challenge and I naturally returned the visit where I found a post about the difficulties of raising a three-year-old – however, from the “B” post onwards, her challenge took a completely different direction – a tale, written on the fly, about a woman discovering she has a superpower… No this wasn’t the wish fulfilment fantasy of a power to quell unruly three-year-olds, but I won’t spoil it by telling you what it is – go check it out… Plus Anuradha manages to start each paragraph with the letter of the day – so much for the slur that women’s brains are addled by children – not in this blog!
Deepa, in her “Fiction Pies” blog, has generated a piece of flash fiction each day – starting with “Animal Farm” and going through to “Zeitun” by way of “Tintin” at the letter “T”! As well as the clever fiction – Animal Farm was a riff on Putin’s war in Ukraine – there is a little review of each book in case you are not familiar with it. I hadn’t heard of Zeitun but will be purchasing it for sure… Deepa was the one who thought up the WhatsApp group which supported this group of friends and how lovely must that have been!
Aparna, at Life of a Woman, a blog name which could easily be a movie title, writes film reviews of the films that she loves and which sustain her as she lives the life of a carer to her daughter, hence, like Afshan, Aparna tells us about herself through her emotional and personal reviews of films. This does not mean that her reviews are only from her point of view and that others might experience them differently, but rather that the reviews tell us about both the films and Aparna, and as I said above, for me, this is what makes a great blog, the opening up and reaching out to others from our own small corners of this tenuous space, the internet…
Renu Sethi of Inner workings of an (in)sane mind, like Aparna, lives in Mumbai but she loves to travel and to photograph her world (hrer other blog is World through my eyes ). Although, like a butterfly, she darted off without completing the Challenge, still like a butterfly, she returned to carry on though it may be an on-off thing, but why not, so many of us complete the madness of April only to collapse in exhaustion until the following April – if having some letters to cover helps Renu continue blogging – good for her. As to her writing, anyone who can begin a post with “Raising a husband can be an exhausting task”…
Ranjana whose blog Expressions (subtitled reflection-by-ranjana), boldly chose to write all her posts as rhyming couplets. This (to me) could be irritating, but giving a fair chance, I found myself enchanted by the content, the manner of it’s telling and the cleverness of the rhyming. Try T#Trickledown Theory… Ranjana is not one of those who dry up after the Challenge and I have enjoyed her subsequent posts too…
Between them, these seven bloggers have turned out a prodigious output during the course of 2022 and if this is the result of supporting each other in a WhatsApp group – then we should all be so lucky to have such a group of friends…
A brief video through the car windscreen in the Morrocan village of Ifraden…
This is my second year n the A2Z Challenge (2021) and this year I am determined to go on the Road Trip in which participants visit some of the blogs they haven’t managed to see during April – the month of itself. If you want to make your own exploration of this year’s Challenge, here is the Masterlist. I wanted to start with an image of a road trip that I had taken myself rather than one plucked from the ether – since you can hear my partner and I chatting as she films and I drive, it may amuse…
First up is The Sound of One Hand Typing, where John Holton treated us to Top Ten charts from various US and Canadian radio stations since radio is unique in its ephemeral nature and although there are not many sources of recorded airplay, there are lists of playlists and top tens – great for music buffs and radio aficionados…
More than Words took book reviews as it’s theme for the A2Z and the thing which makes book reviews interesting, is what they tell you about the reviewer as much as the books themselves, both through the selections they make, and the things they write about them. Pooja Jagtiaani is, as far as I can tell from her site, Indian and some of the books she has chosen for the A2Z Challenge are definitely from an India heritage but many are very cosmopolitan – they are well written reviews and if you want to add to your TBR list – try this blog out and see whether you like Pooja’s taste…
hdhstory is a writer’s blog – Harvey Heilbrun is a retired school teacher who the input of ideas from his former charges. He goes to writing groups and generates flash fiction from them and writing at home. I found the pieces I looked at intriguing but reading is such a subjective thing – you must make up your own mind.
