A to Z blogging: Who I'm Reading

Taking a cue from Tasha's Thinkings, who has been doing a fabulous collection of posts about fictional deities, I'd like to highlight what I've been reading during this year's A to Z blogging challenge. There's so much good stuff out there this year that I'd love to quit my day job and stay home reading blogs all day long!

So here are some favorites I encountered:

I "met" J.H. Moncrieff during the A to Z challenge in a previous year. She's a horror writer and a kickboxer and her A to Z posts this year have kicked butt.  Her theme is "Things That Go Bump in the Night"  and her posts have been filled with the creepy, weird, and strange things that may or may not exist in the sunlit world, but are a heck of a lot of fun in fiction, everything from Annabelle the haunted/possessed doll to Mothman and the Loch Ness Monster.

This year I'm participating as a minion, with a few blogs I'm assigned to visit each day. (I'm part of Tremp's Troops). As part of that, I've found some new favorite blogs to subscribe to and read regularly. One of these is Tarmangani by Dennis L. Goshorn. For A to Z, Dennis is writing about history with a focus on leadership qualities. He's telling interesting stories from American history and using them to highlight the qualities that make a person a good leader. I'm woefully undereducated in history, and have enjoyed these small lessons well told.

I've missed some of his postings now (jeez, job and children and life wanting my attention), but I was really enjoying the flash fiction postings of Jay Dee Archer on I Read Encyclopedias for Fun. They've been very evocative little pieces that build well on each other and the story was becoming really intriguing. I'm hoping to get back and read the rest in May and am happy to have found another new blogger to follow.

As a frustrated traveler held back by money and time, I always enjoy a good travel blog and I've been following two this year.  Elizabeth Hein of Scribbling in the Storage Room has been writing about the Galapagos Islands, which are the setting for a new mystery she's writing and jaybird of Bird's Nest has been writing about her home state of New Jersey and making me see it in a whole new light.

So, who have you been reading? What do you like about their posts?

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This posting is part of the A to Z blogging challenge, in which bloggers undertake to post every day in April, excepting Sundays, which amounts to 26 postings, one for each letter of the alphabet--preferably along a theme. My postings will all be about my debut novel and my experiences writing it and seeing it published.

Blogging A to Z is a great opportunity to connect with some excellent bloggers and interesting people. I encourage you to check out other participating blogs, too!

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