The Liebster Award

I’ve been nominated for a blogger award.

I've been nominated for one of these!

How cool is that?

Not before time, and well-deserved, obviously. Smiles.

Seriously, though, I’m very, very chuffed and a little overwhelmed.

The Liebster is a lovely idea. One blogger nominates others and so it goes, around and around. Potentially, I suppose, we could all end up with awards. That isn’t the point.

The point is to celebrate and encourage. The point is to show our enthusiasm for one another, and our appreciation.

I’m particularly pleased to have been nominated by Anne Goodwin.

Anne and I have never met, but half-a-dozen weeks ago, or so, I got wind of a hashtag for Twitter. I can highly recommend it to other women who write and blog. It is #wwwblogs for Women Writers Wednesday Blogs. Every Wednesday I hashtag my blogplugs on Twitter this way, and I check out the blogs with the hashtag. If you’re a woman and you blog, you should join us. There’s a lovely, growing community of women writers who blog, talking about all sorts of fascinating things. 

Anne is one of them.

I check out her blog on reading and writing regularly, and I retweet it. She talks sense. She’s engaged and thoughtful, often quite considered and sometimes funny. Her blog is quite different from mine, but I always enjoy it and often learn something from it. Reading it on Wednesdays is a pleasure.

I was very pleased when she was nominated for the Liebster, and surprised and delighted when she nominated me in her ten picks. I also had the pleasure of reading the blogs of her other nine nominees.

You begin to see how this works!

Yes, of course it’s a chain letter, and we were all warned against them when we were kids, but it’s also utterly benign. To my nominees I would say do it, or don’t do it. The choice is yours. Have some fun.

One of the things recipients of the nomination are supposed to do is provide 11 random facts about themselves, so here are mine:

1. This is my 549th blog in a little over 2 years.
2. I don’t imbibe caffeine... It doesn’t like me, so my snarks are fueled with real snark, no added stimulants.
3. I have known the husband for 32 years, which is my entire adult life.
4. I usually blog sitting in bed.
5. I do not censor my thoughts on the blog. I probably should.
6. I never delete a comment, except for spam, obviously, nor have I created any hurdles to commenting, including moderating.
7. I intended to blog about writing, but other things took over and now I blog indiscriminately about whatever is on my mind.
8. Ian Rankin once read a blog I wrote. We shared an office for a couple of years in the eighties.
9. I have something else in common with Anne Goodwin; we were both shortlisted for the Mslexia novel writing competition, me in the first and her in the second.
10. I still have an AOL e-mail address, and now tech people think it’s very chic and retro.
11. Sometimes, I’m a ghost-writer.

There are other things to do for the award.

Anne set a raft of questions for me to answer and blog about, which I'm going to have to give some thought to, and I’ve also got to decide on some blogs that I think are worthy of nomination, so look out for at least two more posts about the award.

This is going to be fun.

In the meantime... Go Me!