Return of the Robins!

Yes, the Round Robins are back! We were temporarily derailed by Black Tuesday, delayed by the holidays, discombobulated, dazed and confused. But the holidays are over, and we're all slowly settling in wherever we've landed, whether it's the same old nest on AOL, a new one on Blogspot or AOL UK or elsewhere, or even flitting back and forth from tree to tree. Now it's time to gather the flock, find out where we all are, and go visiting.

This was brought home forcefully for me today as I worked to update the list of existing Robins for the sidebar of the new Round Robin Photo Challenges blog. Some of the people on that list have blogs I still read regularly, on AOL and on Blogspot. Others are people with whom I've lost touch - and a few seem to have disappeared, either in a "moved, no forwarding address" sense or by apparently not blogging much, if at all. (If you have any updates or corrections to the list, please let me know!) Sure, many of us got depressed and discouraged about J-Land back in November, and we've all been busy over the holidays. But maybe now we can start to reconnect, and inspire each other again, and promote each other, and have fun together, and be creative together again. That's what the Round Robin challenges are about.

In case you're new to RR, or have forgotten, I'll explain. The concept is this:

• Round Robin participants take turns suggesting a topic.
  
• The topic is announced on the RR blog, along with the date of the challenge.
  
• Anyone who wants to participate (the more the merrier!) leaves an RSVP in comments, with the URL of the blog whether they'll be posting.
  
• On the challenge date, everyone posts their photo or photos on the anounced topic, along with links to the RR blog and/or each other. That way, everyone can go blog jogging, and see all the neat things people came up with!
  

It's simple! It's fun! And it's a great way to discover new blogs, or rediscover bloggers we've lost track of.

For this first Challenge of the new year, we're relaunching Becky's topic, originally announced before Black Tuesday. The topic: Super Model. Carly has a lot of neat suggestions to get us all started thinking about the possibilities. Me, I'll probably do something kind of out there, some weird interpretation - but I don't quite know yet what that will be.

Ladies and Gentlemen, start charging your camera batteries! The Challenge date is Wednesday, January 18th.

Karen

P.S. With tonight's entry on Messages from Mâvarin, I've finished posting Chapter One of Heirs of Mâvarin. Next week, Chapter Two begins. Oh, and I'm on page 484 in Chapter 14 of the Heirs final edit. Only 1 1/2 chapters to go!