That’s right, folks, it’s another award post. But this is not likely to be one you’ve seen a thousand times before. This award is brand new, created by my friend Sophie Tallis to honor the one-year anniversary of her adventures in blogging and to celebrate the fantasy genre. Today’s award post is all about the Flight of Fantasy Award.
So what is the Flight of Fantasy Award all about? Well, dear reader, read on!
The Rules
- Display the award logo on your blog.
- Link back to the person who nominated you.
- State 11 things about yourself (it’s a Spinal Tap thing), including why you love fantasy and what your first or favorite fantasy book is.
- Nominate 7 bloggers for this award and link to them.
- Notify the nominees and tell them of the award requirements.
I was nominated by none other than award creator and fabulous fantasy author Sophie Tallis, whose wonderful novel White Mountain I can’t wait to get my hands on. And now, for my eleven things:
- I write all my stories longhand. I type them up as I go along and while I couldn’t edit without my computer (well, I could, but I’d have to be a hermit to do it or people might get hurt), I much prefer to create my worlds and characters with a pencil and paper. No pens – I’m too much of a perfectionist for ink. I value my ability to erase quite highly.
- My ability to concentrate seems to be diminishing with age. I used to love having background noise while I read or wrote but now, I like my quiet. Noise while I’m reading still doesn’t bother me much but if I’m trying to write, or especially if I’m trying to edit, I need silence.
- I don’t remember the first fantasy book I read, but it might have been The Princess in the Pigpen. I suppose it’s only loosely a fantasy, but there’s time travel and an Elizabethan nobleman’s daughter who winds up in 1980’s Iowa, so I don’t really know what else it would be. Or maybe The Blood and Thunder Adventure on Hurricane Peak. I think that one would maybe count as comic fantasy. I read both of those in elementary school and they were both favorites.
- The thing I love about fantasy is that it has such a broad definition. I love to escape my boring (okay, sometimes uncomfortably less-than-boring) life and visit far-off places where truly anything can happen. Fantasy lets me do that – it’s one big adventure.
- I really enjoy blogging. Like, the more I do it, the more I enjoy it. But for some reason, I’m having trouble getting back into my regular posting rhythm after the holidays. Apparently I’m not alone in this – I’ve read of others who are similarly having trouble getting back in the swing of things – but it does annoy me.
- I adore Dr. Pepper. If I am in need of caffeine (and let’s face it, I usually am), it’s my go-to caffeine source.
- I can’t stand coffee. I make all the writerly coffee jokes, but unless there’s so much cream, sugar, and chocolate in there that you can’t taste the coffee, I won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.
- I’ve probably said that before. My memory is terrible. I put Miss Price from Bedknobs and Broomsticks to shame.
- As a teenager, I harbored a secret desire to one day publish all my diaries. I wanted to be just like Anne Frank – I wanted to have my story touch the world, not die in a concentration camp. I’ve recently come to realize that if people were to actually read my diaries, especially the volumes from my teen years, they would probably beat me with them as punishment for putting them through such torture. Keeping a diary has been good for both my mental health and improving my skills in penmanship and storytelling, but that’s about it. I’m pretty sure no one would want to read the profanity-laced exploits of a teenage homebody.
- I love old houses with secret passageways and hidden rooms and bookcases that conceal the entrances to both. I wish my house had such novelties, but at 93 years young, it’s far too new for such things.
- The Princess Bride is hands down the best fantasy film ever made. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
And now, for my nominees. This was tough because Sophie nominated so many people that I would also liked to have nominated! 🙂 But as I didn’t want to repeat any nominations, I’ve got a list of seven other very deserving candidates, so please check out their awesome blogs!
And now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to go fix some hot chocolate and settle in for an afternoon of Monopoly. I’ll try not to make my loss to my children too embarrassing. 😀
(c) 2013. All rights reserved.
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- 365 days – one year ago today! (sophieetallis.wordpress.com)
- Want an award? (kateannejack.wordpress.com)
Suddenly they all died. The end. 
Congrats, Kay! You’re right, it was a challenge to find nominees because Sophie tagged so many that I would have chosen.(I had to keep checking her list to make sure I didn’t duplicate) But, I’m a huge blog-junkie, so there were tons of other bloggers I adore.
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I had to keep checking hers, yours, and Kate’s – the two of you beat me to a couple, too. 😀 But you’re absolutely right – there are a ton of talented bloggers out there. There were even a few people I wanted to nominate but they don’t have blogs, so I couldn’t!
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Lol! Sorry guys! *evil laugh* But I just had to nominate our fellow fantasy family members! But hey, it’s great to spread the fantasy love and I see both of you have chosen AWESOME fantasy bloggers!!! Can’t believe I missed out JC, Sammy HK and Valerie, they’ll collectively kick my…ahem…for that,so thank you, Kay, for redressing that!
Fantastic post, Kayster. Yeap you’re not the only one who writes longhand, it does take time though, doesn’t it? Must say I’m a scribbler though, so it’s pencils, pens, crayons, anything to hand! I love the limited attention span as you get older and the Anne Frank thing. As a homebody myself when I was a kid, I was horribly drawn to the tragic story of Anne Frank and so wanted to be a doomed heroine. As for attention span…uh…what was I talking about? Just an awesome blog and so well deserving of this award. Well done honey! 😀 xx
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Aw, thank you! I can’t say I exactly wanted to be a doomed heroine, but I did desperately want for the whole world to read – and love – my scribblings. And of course, back then, they really were scribblings. It’s taken years of practice to produce the fine chicken scratch you can see in my header. 🙂
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Absolutely my pleasure honey. Fine chicken scratch, eh?! …lol! I love that. Yeap, I went through this strange doomed or troubled hero/heroine phase, a diet of too dystopian fiction! 😀
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I’ve never gotten into dystopian fiction. That said, I watched The Hunger Games with the fam after Miss Tadpole got it for her birthday and now I think I need to read the books. I kept having the feeling that I was missing something; the whole Katniss-Peeta-Gale thing just felt off somehow. Clearly there was a lot left out, but it was still a good movie. So there’s another trilogy added to my TBR list. 😀
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I know what you mean, I too watched the Hunger Games movie and enjoyed it but I was left rather cold by it – it just didn’t thrill me in the same way that the Dark Knight Trilogy does. 😀
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I still haven’t seen the third one! Naughty Seymour went and saw it without me. I know he’ll want to buy it, so I guess I’ll just have to wait till then to see it. Besides, my couch is more comfy than those theater seats, anyway. 😉
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Not sure if I’ll bother, certainly won’t go to the movies, will wait til a friend gets the nest one on DVD. Yeap, couch is MUCH more comfy, I find cinemas air conditioning so ultra cold that I’m freezing my *** off half the time! 😀
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Congrats on your new award 🙂 glad there’s another out there who isn’t a coffee fanatic, and I must say I prefer ink to pencil, it doesn’t fade and you can recover the strike throughs 😉
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Thank you!
I prefer ink to pencil, it doesn’t fade
That’s true – I’ll give you that. Part of my adoration of longhand stems from my lack of computer for so many years. Handwriting just became second nature to me and I am very slow to change. I think glaciers change course faster than I do. 😀 I hate to think how many trees I killed my freshman year of high school when I felt that the story that I wrote, which topped out at 300 pages or so, if I remember right, was good enough to be preserved for posterity in ink. I set about recopying it in perfect print with my favorite fountain pen and every time I screwed up, I grabbed a fresh piece of paper and started the page over. I went through a lot of paper on that project before I finished because I didn’t want my pages marred by White Out (this was prior to the invention of the tape stuff, back when it was all liquid and I didn’t want to wait for it to dry).
That said, my aunt found an old ledger from one of our ancestors that was written in pencil. It dates back to the nineteenth century and is still legible. So maybe pencil has better staying power than we think? I use a lot of pressure when I write, so who knows – maybe I’ll have ground the graphite into the paper fibers well enough that it’ll last forever! 😀
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I love that you still write long-hand! I haven’t been able to since college, when I remembered assignments that were due in 5 minutes. 😉 (And yay Dr. Pepper!!!!)
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Oh, college. I did a lot more typing in college because it was just easier to do all my papers that way, but for fun, I love longhand. Seymour took some test shots of me with pencil and paper in hand as he was playing around with his new camera a few weeks ago and dubbed them, “The Wife, In Her Natural Habitat.” I thought it was pretty funny.
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