Scavenger Hunt Fun

Plant seeds of happiness, hope, success, and love; it will all come back to you in abundance. This is the law of nature. ~Steve Maraboli

The Christian Fiction Scavenger Hunt is over. It was a great weekend with hundreds of readers stopping by the posts of the twenty-four authors who took part with some fabulous and fun content. I thank all of you who stopped by here, entered my giveaway and left comments. I always enjoy hearing from readers. To encourage comments I asked what you liked about Christian fiction. I liked reading your responses and often nodded my head that yes, those are exactly the best things about Christian fiction and why I love writing stories for people like you.

While I did have fun reading all the Scavenger Hunt posts by the other authors and seeing your comments and knowing you were having fun too, Thursday night, the first night of the Hunt, had my stress meter at explosive levels. You see, in a Scavenger Hunt, it’s very necessary to have each post link to the next post and on through all stops. In this case, that was twenty-five stops and my post was on Stop #9 and my blog hosting Mindy Starns Clark was Stop #10. (If you missed out on the hunt, the great posts are all still out there. You can find links on my Christian Fiction Scavenger Hunt post. No prizes now except the fun of reading all the posts and discovering new authors and books.)

In an attempt to be ahead of the hounds, I had prepared her post way ahead of time and had it ready and scheduled to go on Wednesday night as we were making sure everything worked. Well, the post worked, but for some reason I lost the comments option on the post. So Thursday night, after Mindy asked me about this, I tried to fix it. Well, I fixed it for sure. I took down the post and reposted it, but alas, the link was no longer the same. I knew it was different and I thought I had changed that, but I forgot to note the unchangeable date embedded in the link. Sigh. So I had to contact Jane Kirkpatrick who was hosting me on Stop #9 to get the link changed. The problem was that this was late at night and while she had just sent me an e-mail, she had then turned to other things. So I gave her a panicked phone call. That was the good part of all this stress. I got to talk to Jane Kirkpatrick, an amazing writer, whom I admire. I also got to talk to Lisa Bergren, the one who was organizing and getting the Scavenger Hunt going. She was very graceful in forgiving my oops that broke the link chain. We got it fixed pronto.

All was well, or so we thought. But then I checked my site for those comments I’d been missing and NOTHING! Just a message that I had exceeded my bandlength or was it width? Whatever, it was something I knew nothing about, except that my site being down once more broke the Scavenger Hunt chain. What do you do when it’s almost midnight and way too late to call anybody in panic mode? I sent an “I can’t believe this, but” message to Lisa who fixed a work around my downed site and a “help” message to my internet host person. I really didn’t expect him to see the message till morning, but he did. And he saved the day by changing Mindy’s cute video that had taken down my site to a YouTube video. The original video file was a big download and everybody, or at least several hundred of you, watching it on my site used up that bandwidth. (Yes, it is bandwidth not length. I just checked.)

But I went to bed not knowing he’d seen my message and feeling totally helpless and very stressed. Not a good way to get any sleep. Except you know what I should have done, don’t you? I should have realized I’d done all I could do, said a prayer for calm and remembered that sometimes the Lord takes pity on stressed out people and fixes things. After all, it was only a Scavenger Hunt. Something fun for sure and I wanted to make sure my part was a help to the whole and not a hindrance. Still it wasn’t a hurricane flooding Texas or blowing away Florida and not a wildfire destroying many homes in California after another wildfire had raged through the northwest. Perspective – that’s what I needed and eventually did manage to get. Everything got fixed. Many people stopped by my site. I had fun. I hope you did too.

The Winners Have Been Picked

The five grand prize winners have been picked out of the many entrants. Those winners have been announced on Stop #25. You can check it out there to see if you were one of the really lucky winners.

But I had my own giveaway here. I thank each of you who entered and agreed to give my e-newsletter a try and a big thanks to those of you already signed up for the newsletter who entered too. You are all winners in my book, but unfortunately I can only mail out one prize. So, Sue Boggs is the winner of my Rosey Corner books and the Willow Tree Keepsake box. Sue, I’ll be sending you a private e-mail to get your mailing address.

Again thank you for reading. And now we will return to our regularly scheduled posts. Well, wait before I go, we did also pick the winner of the book Destination: Romance from last week’s guest post by Rose McCauley. Lucy Reynolds, you were the winner of that book, so please check your e-mails and let me know if you didn’t receive it.

The spring, summer, is quite a hectic time for people in their lives, but then it comes to autumn, and to winter, and you can’t but help think back to the year that was, and then hopefully look forward to the year that is approaching. ~Enya

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