Coming Soon …. Blogophilia Relaunch!!

I’m back….

Everybody’s got to cry sometimes
I never understood the reason why
Suddenly the answer is so clear I’m…
Missing you

Never thought that we would end this way
And if I only had three words to say
They would simply flow so easy, I’m…
Missing you

“Missing You” by Paula Abdul

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Greetings, Earthlings! I have been missing you all, and hope you are doing well.

Did you think I was abducted by aliens? Not quite! My summer hiatus last year ended up extending into a year-long, whirlwind tour of Planet Earth. Apologies for my extended absence and for being MIA, but I was taking an extra long break to decompress. I explored the wonders of your beautiful planet, hitting one country a month. Commander K and I saw the sights, lived life to the fullest, and I have pictures to share with you!

Now I’m back on Mars and ready for some blogging again. How about you? This time, the challenge is going to be a little different than in years past. We will transition to a more inclusive, collaborative type of writing challenge. Competition can be fun, but truth be told, keeping the weekly challenge going was extremely labor and time intensive! There was a LOT of work behind the scenes. All of the blog preparation, scoring, linking, point tallying, keeping track of participant prompts used, tracking correct topic/picture/picture phrase guesses and sewing weekly jackets added many, many, many hours of work (about 30 hours per week for the Marvin crew) to Marvin’s already busy schedule. And this is a volunteer gig, LOL!

Our hope is create a kinder, gentler and supportive Blogophilia world. Marvin will continue to post a weekly blog on Sundays over on WordPress and encourage writers to participate. Topics, bonuses and pictures will still be posted, but not for scoring purposes. They will be mostly for inspiration, and to get your creative wheels turning. We want you have the freedom to use these prompts (or not), as sometimes the combination of prompts just don’t fit into what you want or need to write. Also, if you need to skip a week, you won’t have to worry about getting behind, “losing points” or writing a blog under pressure! After all, life gets busy and the Marvin crew understands that.

Our main purpose will be to inspire, support, encourage friendships and to get you writing!! After all, that is the most important thing! Marvin will continue to visit your blogs and read, but simply give kudos. You may continue to post the link to your blog on the Martien Ecrits timeline or in the Ecrits Blogophilia group. We will link your blog in our weekly WordPress blog as usual.

To reiterate, going forward we are eliminating the awarding/tracking of points and jackets. This may disappoint some, but a change was necessary. (And yes indeed, even aliens are resistant to change!) Our focus will be on WRITING and BLOGGING, as well it should be.

So get your pens ready, and join us on Sunday, October 2 (next week) for the relaunch of Blogophilia! We are excited and can’t wait to see you there!

Alien Love,

Marvin Martian aka Martien Ecrits