Last year I was introduced to this great idea about producing a quality blog post every day for a month throughout April. Unfortunately I was a little late to ‘officially’ enter us into the 2013 challenge but no fear, 2014 is different! I am pleased to announce that A Brit and A Southerner is officially registered for the 2014 A to Z Challenge.
![a-to-z HEADER [2014] - april](https://abritandasoutherner.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/a-to-z-HEADER-2014-april.png)
The Challenge
Can you post every day except Sundays during the month of April 2014? If you can achieve this let’s add another notch of difficulty to the challenge, can you blog thematically from A to Z throughout this month? If you think the answer to both of these questions is yes, then go for it!!
At first the thought of creating a new article every day for a month probably seems pretty simple. Well, after last year’s experience I can honestly say it’s much harder than you would initially imagine.
How do I intend on doing a better job this year? One simple word – PLANNING! I think to make this challenge less stressful, you have to plan and prepare in advance and ‘hopefully’ I will do a much better job at achieving this. They always say you learn from your mistakes and experiences, well only time will tell.
Our Theme
So after deciding to sign up for this year’s 2014 A to Z Challenge, yes we were pretty early this year to ensure we signed up in time #194 on the list. By the way, if you are interested in signing up for this challenge, you can view every other participant here and join up yourself – SIGN UP HERE.
Without further ado, I would like to introduce to you our theme for the 2014 A to Z Challenge – DREAM DESTINATIONS
Every day starting from Tuesday, April 1st, we will be featuring a series of “Dream Destinations” from around the world that are part of our bucket list. These destinations may be countries or cities that we have either already visited or would love to visit in the near future!
We will use both the #DreamDestinations and #AtoZChallenge hashtags on all of our posts on Social Media.
Other Notable Participants
We are delighted to announce that some of our travel blogging friends are also participating in this year’s A to Z Challenge. We will be closely following their progress and of course showing our support for their challenge. We are all in this together and hopefully we will drag each other across the line come the end of April.
Here are some of our featured blogs that we would encourage you to follow and support throughout April 2014 and beyond:
If you are participating in this year’s challenge, please comment with your information, we would be delighted to follow your adventures!
There you have it, all there is now is the mere matter of 26 posts to interest, intrigue and excite you! We hope that you all enjoy reading our posts and if nothing else join us in learning more about the beautiful world we all live in.
Glad you made sign-ups on time this year Your theme sounds like a good one.
Lee
We are excited about participating in the challenge this year! I am under no illusions that this is going to be easy and I have to admit that I have still to plan my 26 posts but hey that’s part of the excitement right. Good luck with the challenge, will definitely be keeping up with you! We all need to stick together in this and help each other.
In a sudden moment of weakness, I signed on the dotted line too. There’s not much time to plan ahead so it will be interesting to see how it all goes. Look forward to following your posts!
Good luck with the challenge Jenny! You will do great I am sure. I really haven’t done much planning at all and this time next week it gets underway. Looking forward to following your posts also.
Wow, good luck with this! I’d love to participate, but our April is already ridiculously packed and this is the first I’ve heard of the challenge! Maybe next year. In the meantime, I can’t wait to read a ton of new posts that get my wanderlust going!
Cheers Jessi, it’s a tough challenge but it really does teach you organizational and planning skills which I seriously lack right now. At least I have a focused theme to concentrate on which should hopefully help with the challenge, but the problem is I haven’t even started writing anything yet!
It’s going to be a busy April I think.
Lol there is NO way I could pull this off! Recently I’ve been trying to post 3x/week and oh my, that has been rough.
It’s tough Syd! I plan on doing shorter posts and am trying to work out a template that I can use to keep some consistency on the posts each day. But this in itself is challenging enough!!
Good luck with the blogs I’m looking forward to reading them,it sounds pretty difficult to achieve but I’m sure planning ahead is the answer along with steely determination to complete the task. Good luck!
Amazing idea but as someone who struggles to notch up two posts a week, it’s not something I could commit to without pulling out my eyelashes. Maybe it’s because I do long-reads (usually 2,000 to 3,000 words per post)…thought that should make me a good candidate for NaNoWriMo! Good luck with the challenge. Nice topic. I’ll look forward to reading.
Good luck! I wish I had known about this last year when I was unemployed and had the time to do it, but now working full time I can barely handle the 2-3 posts I do a week. I’ll be following along and looking forward to seeing all your dream destinations!
You guys are all very brave souls. Can’t wait to see what you come up with! I’m not ready for this kind of challenge yet. ;P
Wauw, respect! With working full-time (for now) and putting in long hours, I only manage to put one post up per week. We’ll be following your posts (and those of your fellow-bloggers of course). You all have our support!
Just discovered your blog via Twitter. I’m doing A to Z on travel too – Anabel’s Travel Blog – but retrospectively: places I’ve been. Maybe we’ll overlap!
Yikes… too bad if I was going to quit… kidding BRING.IT.ON!
Always love a challenge and that’s what this is all about!! You never know what it’s going to be like until you dive in head first….oh and then you realize what a nightmare it can be 🙂 I am sure we will all be fine, just support each other and we will make it!!
Roll on Tuesday, April 1!
I wish I could join, but I have too much on my plate. Hopefully next year 🙂
I certainly would encourage folks to sign up for this but it does take a lot of commitment in order to complete this challenge. We completed unofficially last year but I admit it was tough, even harder than you could imagine if you thought about participating! It’s only when you are midway through the challenge and you realize just the extent of this is. We generally post 2-3 times per week and don’t find enough time to efficiently do this schedule, so trying to post 6 times per week is going to be rough I am sure, yet still maintaining good quality content.
‘S’ had better be for Slovenia or you’ll force me to seriously consider unliking your FB page. 🙂
Keep that in mind Bob!! Problem is there are so many bucket list places beginning with ‘S’ such as South Africa, Switzerland, Slovenia etc. You will just have to wait and see, maybe that will be a bonus multiple letter day!
Why not? I have no idea how this will work out, let alone a theme but it should be fun. Think I may as well sign up now. Thanks guys and we will look at yours and the others you have listed.
Awesome! Just added you to our intro post and will be following along with you on the challenge. It’s a great way to learn about time management. I am trying to get ahead developing our posts, so far have A through D put together which I guess is a start. It’s all about sticking together and helping each other out.
I think I would do it if i only posted pictures with captions which is doable, but I salute you for blogging everyday…good luck with that – don’t burn out.
Unfortunately I am too busy now with my job to be able to do something like this. And even if I had the time, I would probably have trouble coming up with a blog a day.
Good luck.
Good luck Chris, that is a cool challenge, I do like the idea. If I wasn’t so deep into researching and writing about festivals and locations here, I would love to give it a try, but the A to Z would currently take me off my own focus. I really look forward to seeing how you and Heather get on – have fun with it!!
This does sound an incredibly hard challenge although, as you say, it will be a little easier with some good forward planning. I would love to join in but realistically don’t think I could manage it! Good luck. I’m looking forward to following your posts.
Looking forward to following along! I have a very similar theme 😉 so we might overlap quite a bit! Good luck! And I’m off to continue preplanning now!
Chris…Congrats for signing up this year. I’ve jumped in the deep end, too. I look forward to your Dream Destinations!
Good luck with the challenge! I can’t say I’ve ever entered anything like this (I continuously find myself setting my own personal challenges instead, I suppose) so will be interested to see how it unfolds… best of luck! 🙂
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Poppin’ in from the A to Z Blog Challenge.
You have chosen a great them!
Thanks we are excited about the challenge! Looking forward to following your posts also. Cheers for stopping by.
[…] post is part of the 2014 A to Z Blogging Challenge (#DreamDestinations […]
I really like your Dream Destinations A to Z challenge idea, and love your badge! You’ve inspired me to try my hand at making one for my own challenge, which is a Dream Destination to some, San Diego.
Cheers Donna and we are glad you have got the inspiration to try this for yourself. Sure San Diego will be a dream destination for many folks. In fact, I would love to visit this part of California for myself. I am actually heading to LA this weekend for a work conference and know it’s only about 1 1/2 hrs north of San Diego so would be cool if I was able to make a detour down that way to explore further.
[…] Turtle – Reflections Enroute – A Southern Gypsy – A Passion and A Passport – A Brit & A Southerner – A Taste of Travel – Have Blog Will Travel – Travelling Book Junkie – Flat tires and Slow […]
[…] post is part of the 2014 A to Z Blogging Challenge (#DreamDestinations […]
[…] Turtle – Reflections Enroute – A Southern Gypsy – A Passion and A Passport – A Brit & A Southerner – A Taste of Travel – Have Blog Will Travel – Travelling Book Junkie – Flat tires and Slow […]
[…] post is part of the 2014 A to Z Blogging Challenge (#DreamDestinations […]
[…] Turtle – Reflections Enroute – A Southern Gypsy – A Passion and A Passport – A Brit & A Southerner – A Taste of Travel – Have Blog Will Travel – Travelling Book Junkie – Flat tires and Slow […]
I want to visit Croatia! I have many friends who have talked about how beautiful it is, but I’ve never been myself. You have inspired me to find Plitvice Lakes National Park as I am a huge nature freak. Thanks for the tips!
Signed,
An American Who Loves a Dutchie 😉
Thanks Jennifer, I hope you will find more inspiration from the rest of our posts in this #DreamDestinations series – I know we are doing 🙂 Plitvice Lakes National Park looks gorgeous doesn’t it? I love visiting locations that have natural waterfalls and lakes so this looks a perfect spot.
[…] post is part of the 2014 A to Z Blogging Challenge (#DreamDestinations […]
We are late to the party (only on C but will catch up!) but we are in!
No problem at all, welcome to the challenge Andrea! Will definitely head over to your site and check out how the challenge is going for you. Keep up the great work guys!