This is not my blog.

Buzzardbilly passed along an award to me that she received from Evil Twin's Wife this weekend. It is my first receipt of a blogger award and I'm thrilled! I keep seeing these Creative Thinker and other types of blogger awards and even though they are awarded by readers of your blog I've been jealous for not having received one yet after 18 months of blogging and over 850 posts. Alas, now I have received the "A Roar For Powerful Words!" award from the Shameless Lions Writing Circle, a New Zealand blogger who seeks to promote good and powerful writing in the blogosphere. The nitty gritty of the award is that it is to be given to those who the reader loves and thinks has writing that is good and powerful. It's a "chance to scream from the mountains the good news about the powerful posts that are produced every day in the blogosphere, despite what some mainstream columnists and journalists claim. This is also a good chance to examine exactly what it is that makes writing good and powerful."

Those who are given the award are asked to write three rules that they believe are necessary for good, powerful writing, and then pass it on to five other bloggers to send a roar through the blogosphere. The advice was fairly easy to come up with.

Now, as for my advice...

1. Write something every day: even if you end up not posting it your daily writing will help hone your skills and you may end up revisiting some of those stub posts later and fleshing them out when the thought next occurs to you. Through this process you will find your blogging voice.

2. Buy a digital camera: or get a cellphone that has a camera and take it with you everywhere. A good picture will inspire a good blogpost ... with or without words (aka "blog fodder"). Good pictures will also enhance mediocre blogposts. There have been lots of posts where I'll take a picture of something and it will inspire my words and there I have another post. When I walk around now I see things with a "blogger's eye."

3. Rip off other bloggers (with credit): borrow a picture or post idea from someone you like to read and then make sure to link back to that person. Don't think of it as stealing so long as you pay tribute to the other blogger and send some traffic his/her way and vice-versa using links. If someone complains then reassess if you want to keep the post up but most of the time you're going to get credit for helping another group of bloggers find that person's page ... or hear nothing at all.

Now as for picking five bloggers ... that was hard to do. I try to read blogs when I can but I don't get to do so as often as I would like. Lucky for me some of the heavy hitters that I read have already been tagged such as The Film Geek and Donutbuzz. Thus, I was able to focus on a few of the ones who are a bit more quirky and fit into those niches of my mind. Thus, here are my picks to pass this award on to.

Infinity Ranch - JDB just hit his 2000th post and has been blogging for several years longer than I have. He doesn't use fancy sitemeter stats to keep his spirit into his writing and doesn't worry if he doesn't get comments. Yet he continues to write about controversial topics like religion, law, and politics on a daily basis and I love reading his take on the news of the day.

Random (but not really) - Michelle is a person, "cleverly disguised as a responsible adult", who certainly writes some powerful words and she also writes about words quite a bit with book reviews and other forms of geekery (sometimes implicating me). She's also a regular commenter here and always has something thoughtful and insightful to say.

Facing The Sharks - Shark Girl is facing an uphill battle every day of her life and she writes about that struggle in her blog with great emotion and urgency. You really get the sense of what it is like to be swimming with sharks from reading her blog about her ongoing litigation against the Federal Government, Robins Air Force Base, and the Department of Justice (powerful words indeed).

The Putnam Scoop - For being a local businesswoman I'm always impressed at how freely that Sarah expresses herself on her blogs. She is very open about her views on things and does not shy away from political commentary or talking about local issues of interest. She promotes other bloggers and participates in their comments (here as well). And she also said nice things about me recently. :-)

Muzings - Muze Euterpe writes some powerful things and leaves some great comments. I like seeing what she is thinking about or how she is going to take on an issue with her libertarian/conservative slant. The thing that I most enjoy about her writing though is that it is not typical stuff, it is uniquely hers and I appreciate her powerful words.

If I had more awards to give out I would have to pick raging red, Barbie Girl, and Elvis Drinkmo ... but I'll leave them to someone else.

Labels: misc