Liebster Award 2017

 

Recently, I have been debating whether or not my writing is making a difference and if I should continue to share my words with the world. I had not been writing as much due to a lot of things happening in my life. So, when I found out that I was nominated for the Liebster Award, I was surprised. I hadn’t even written much in the last two weeks, but someone else saw potential in my writing. It makes me feel like my questions have been answered. I should continue to write and share it.

Delicate Fighter at delicatefighter.wordpress.com nominated me for this award. This blog is dedicated to showing people how to live a happier and more peaceful life. Each post is a well-guided advice as to how to love yourself and how to find your own happiness. I would like to thank Delicate Fighter for this nomination and for showing me that I too can find inner happiness by sharing my creativity.

What is the Liebster Award?

The Liebster Award serves to bring new bloggers some recognition as well as some well-needed motivation. This blogging community is brought closer each year through this award which enables us to support each other. More information can be found here.

Here are the rules (copied from The Global Aussie):

If you have been nominated for The Liebster Award AND YOU CHOOSE TO ACCEPT IT, write a blog post about the Liebster award in which you:

1. Thank the person who nominated you, and posts a link to their blog on your blog. Try to include a little promotion for the person who nominated you. They will thank you for it and those who you nominate will also help you out as well.
2. Display the award on your blog — by including it in your post and/or displaying it using a “widget” or a “gadget”. (Note that the best way to do this is to save the image to your own computer and then upload it to your blog post.) At the bottom of this post, I’ve included a whole lot of images you can use for your 2016 Liebster Award.
3. For the 2016 Liebster Award, I will be shaking things up! Write a 150-300 word post about your favorite blog that is not your own. Explain why you like the blog, provide links.
4. Provide 10 random facts about yourself. (This year I’m making this optional. If you wish to engage with your readers it’s a great idea to include random facts about you.)
5. Nominate 5 – 11 blogs that you feel deserve the award, who have a less than 200 followers. (Note that you can always ask the blog owner this since not all blogs display a widget that lets the readers know this information!)
6. List these rules in your post (You can copy and paste from here.) Once you have written and published it, you then have to:
7. Inform the people/blogs that you nominated that they have been nominated for the Liebster award and provide a link for them to your post or mine if you don’t have all the information so that they can learn about it (they might not have ever heard of it!)

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Don’t forget to create 11 questions for them to answer. Notify your nominees and provide a link to your post so that they’ll know what to do. Once you’re done, follow this link and leave a comment linking your post.

I’ll start with 10 facts about myself:

1. I am 33 years old.

2. I have 4 children ages 9, 8, 5, and 2.

3.  I married my college boyfriend and we have been together almost 15 years.

4. I love to write poetry and short stories, but I want to write a novel. I have started but have yet to finish one.

5.  I have lived in 7 states (New York, Minnesota, Florida, North Carolina, Michigan, Arkansas, and South Dakota)

6.  I love stories with a twist or a creepy vibe.

7.  I can get lost in a book and stay up way too late reading.

8.  I was a teacher for 10 years, 6 years in preschool and 4 years in middle school English.

9. I am now a stay at home mom because we moved across the country for my husband’s career. I miss being apart of education and may go back.

10. I have been published in the paper a few times and was in an anthology poetry book when I was a teenager.

 

Here are a few words about my favorite blogger:

 

My favorite blogger is Scary Mommy. I was first exposed to this amazing blog by friends on facebook. It takes a very real and humorous view of parenting. As a parent, I find all of the blogs about parenting usually frustrating because they are a little too unrealistic. Scary Mommy makes me feel better about my own struggles as a parent and gives me a lot of insight into things that people aren’t brave enough to tackle.

My blog may be titled “Not Your Average Mom” but I don’t consider myself strictly a mom blogger. Scary Mommy covers all different aspects of life and not all of them are strictly involving being a parent. I enjoy their confessions page where people can write their own confessions. Then people can hit buttons that say like, hugs, or me too on them. It is a way for people to anonymously confess things and other people support them. No one is negative to anyone’s confessions, and I find that really refreshing.

Check out http://www.scarymommy.com for a humorous approach to life and parenting.

Here are the questions by Delicate Fighter:

1. What keeps you driven in life? Feedback from other writers keeps me driven to keep writing. For all other things in my life, my family is what drives me.
2. What is your biggest dream? I dream to write a complete novel and have it published.
3. What does your blog mean to you? It is my way to express myself and get feedback to see if my writing is worth the time to write it.
4. What is the biggest challenge that you face in running your blog? I did not realize how constant blogs are. I am writing in my free time which is not always available to me as a stay at home mom who is married to someone who works long hours.
5. How do you overcome that challenge? If I feel inspired to write, I try my best to get out a device and write while my kids are content.
6. What advice would you give to new bloggers who lack recognition? Seek ways to share your work. Sometimes the best writers are just not seen by enough people to get the recognition that they deserve.
7. If you could change one thing in your life, what would it be? I would stress less and smile more.
8. What makes you incredibly happy in life? When someone compliments my creativity. I get happy when my family is happy or we share cherishable moments, but my true joy comes from being recognized for what I create.
9. How far does society affect how you view yourself and others? The older that I get the more that I realize that society is not the one that controls how I feel or act. It took a long time to get to that conclusion, for sure.
10. What is your biggest regret? Not sticking with my writing. I gave up in college because of fear of failure. I went on to teach and it was through teaching my students how to write by example that I realized that I always had talent and that I never should have given up on it.
11. From where do you draw inspiration to write? I use my own experiences but my biggest inspiration is when someone gives me a word or a theme. I thrive on being given a direction and expand upon it.

Those were all the questions. Thank you once again, Delicate Fighter for nominating me!

Here are my nominees:

1. https://sarahgarces.com/
2. https://saysthedarkgirlblog.wordpress.com/
3. https://theshortstorypress.wordpress.com/
4. https://lindamims.com/
5. https://outlawpoetry.com/

Congratulations to each and every one of you and thank you for sharing your work! If your name is not on this list, it does not mean that you aren’t good enough, please keep writing and remember that being unearthed doesn’t make a diamond less precious.

 

To my fellow nominees, if you choose to accept this nomination, here are your questions:

1. Why do you write?
2. What makes you unique?
3. What inspires you to be a better writer?
4. What makes you happy?
5. Which one of your posts is your favorite and why?
6. How old were you when you first started writing for pleasure?
7. What is your biggest dream?
8. What do you want your future to look like?
9. Why is it important to you to share your writing?
10. If you didn’t spend your time writing, what would you be doing instead?
11. Who inspires you the most?

Please keep in mind that you have until Christmas to write your acceptance post, following the above-mentioned rules.