Welcome to Thursday Doors! This is a weekly challenge for people who love doors and architecture to come together to admire and share their favorite door photos, drawings, or other images or stories from around the world. If you’d like to join us, simply create your own Thursday Doors post each (or any) week and then share a link to your post in the comments below, anytime between 12:01 am Thursday morning and Saturday noon (North American eastern time). If you like, you can add our badge to your post.
I know a lot of you aren’t sports fans, but bear with me on this one. This past Sunday, The Pittsburgh Pirates completed a 4-game sweep of the Miami Marlins. This took place in Miami. The Pirates hadn’t swept a 4-game series on the road since 1903. Since I happen to have doors I collected while touring the Pirates’ home field—PNC Park, I decided to share them today. Enough about baseball. The pictures are explained in the captions. Let’s move onto the subject in the title.
Less than four weeks from today, the 4th Annual Thursday Doors Writing Challenge (TDWC) begins. When I started the challenge four years ago, calling it an “Annual” event was aspirational, to say the least. I am thrilled to say that it has grown each year, as writers, storytellers and poets have contributed almost 100 creative works in the first three years. More about that in the coming weeks. Right now, we need doors. Before I explain the process/rules for submitting door images, I’d like to unveil the TDWC badge for 2024. Created by Teagan R. Geneviene, I think it will get our creative juices flowing.
TDWC invites the people in our community to write (or otherwise create) something that is inspired by a door. The writing challenge begins on May 1st, but we begin collecting doors today. Anyone can contribute a door, and it couldn’t be easier.
Choose a door (or doors, see below), either from one of your Thursday Doors posts or from your camera, or your easel, or from your digital studio. The only requirement is that you possess the rights to publish the image and that those rights can be and are extended to others.
A note about AI doors. While you are more than welcome to start your creative process with an AI driven bit of software, I would ask (God knows I’ll never be able to ensure) that you manipulate that image in some way before sharing it here. Again, I remind you that you must have the right to share the image. If your right requires an attribution of any sort, please include it with your submission so the TDWC participants can include it as well.
Here are some other pesky rules:
- Limit yourself to three images. If you can’t narrow it down to three, I will.
- Please rank your images according to the joy they bring you. If I receive an abundance of images, I may have to pull the limit back to two per person and I don’t want to delete your favorite.
- Either provide the URL of the image in your Media Library (preferred) or the post in which it appears (and some way of identifying it—third from the top on the left, or some such thing). I will copy the images and organize them for the TDWC participants to choose from.
- Put the link in a comment on any of my blog entries, beginning with this one.
- If you have a door but don’t have a blog, send the image to me at “NoFacilities at Gmail dot Com” I’m sure you know how that works.
- Submit your doors by noon on Saturday, April 28th so I can assemble the collection and announce it with the Sunday Recap on April 29th.
If you want to see examples of the doors that have been contributed in the past, open the sub-menu under the Thursday Doors menu item in the header. All those links open in a new window. Writing entries are on top, and the images are found below. I hope you can join us in this challenge. I know many of you are writing for April A-to-Z or NaPoWriMo, but hopefully you can take a few minutes to find a door(s) to send in. I also hope you’ll be able to join us in May with a writing entry inspired by a door.
Our tour of PNC Park began outside on the Riverwalk and then crawled through the lower level where the magic happens. We toured the Press Box and the Pittsburgh Baseball Club. The club has been improved in the off season. Since we only attend one game a year, we spring for club-level seats so it will be fun to see the changes they made.
I hope you enjoy the gallery. I should mention that PNC Park has recently been rated the Best Ballpark in the USA, by USA Today. I also hope you can spend a few minutes to visit some of the other bloggers who are participating today. The links are in the comment section.
All five of my current books are now available in audio book form thanks to Amazon KDP’s Virtual Voice process. The voice is AI generated, but I can honestly say, it’s pretty darn good. The audio books are reasonably priced (all below $7 US) and, if you already own the Kindle version and want to add an audio version, you can do that for $1.99. There is a five-minute sample on the book page for each book. If you’re interested, click on any of the Dreamer’s Alliance book links below the image or on the link below for my latest book.
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