The Liebster Award

Many thanks to Roland Clarke, who has nominated me for

the Liebster Award. I have a lot of respect for Roland. He set himself an amazingly difficult theme from the A to Z challenge and still managed to complete it. I learned a lot about him from his answers to the Liebster Award questions.

I received this award once before, a long time ago. I don’t remember it being so difficult then. I shall attempt to complete all the  tasks.

Rules of the Liebster Award

• Thank the person who nominated you, and post a link to their blog in your post.
• Display the award on your blog — by including it in your post and/or displaying it using a “widget” or a “gadget”.
• Answer 11 questions about yourself, which will be provided to you by the person who nominated you.
• Provide 11 random facts about yourself.
• Nominate 5 – 11 blogs that you feel deserve the award, who have a less than 1000 followers. [Some claim that this is a flexible rule, so I’m ignoring it.]
• Create a new list of questions for the nominees to answer.
• List these rules in your post (copy and paste from here). Once you have written and published it, you then have to:
  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 so that they can learn about it (they might not have ever heard of it!).

11 Questions Roland Set Me

1. Do you have goals for your blog? What are they?
   I want to continue to connect with people through the blog. I want to explain more about entities that are often misunderstood: me, social anxiety, Israel and more. If readers of my blog also buy my novel, I won’t complain.
2. Do you have a blogging schedule?
   The series Letters from Elsewhere appears every Friday morning. Other posts appear whenever.
3. I can hardly resist a blogging challenge. Do you participate in many?
   I try to keep away from them, but the A to Z challenge tugs at me every year. Blogging challenges have a lot of uses, but my main task is to write and publish novels.
4. What is your favourite way to interact with other bloggers?
   There are lots of ways to interact. What I like best is when an online friend becomes an offline (face-to-face) friend.
5. What is your own personal favourite of your own blog posts, and why?
   I’ve been blogging for seven years and have posted 679 posts (including this one). I’ve narrowed my favourites down to one month: January 2010. Any of those six posts could be my favourite.
6. What kind of blogs do you like to read the most?
   Humour (of the sort I enjoy), stories, interesting facts. I enjoy many kinds of blogs, but tend to skim long posts due to a lack of time. (I didn’t choose the length of this post.)
7. Where would you most like to visit?
   I’d most like to visit faraway friends, including those in Canada and Australia.
8. If you could have any kind of pet, what would it be?
   We had a cat for about ten years and enjoyed that. But we don’t particularly want another pet.
9. If you could choose to live in another time, when would you choose?
   I don’t think we’ve ever had it so good.
10. Would you change your chosen career path?
    Being a writer? No! The previous jobs? No. They provided good experience and they paid fairly well. They were also mostly enjoyable for most of the time.
11. Do you have a favourite book that you re-read?
    No. There are books I’ve loved, but I have a long list of books to be read and I don’t read quickly.

11 Random Things About Myself

1. I love milk chocolate filled with orange-flavoured cream.
2. Of all the countries I’ve visited, Egypt is the most impressive. I wish I could go back.
3. I have never skied and I don’t intend to.
4. I have an A-level in Music, Grade 8 in piano and Grade 6 in violin. (But don’t ask me to play anything now.)
5. I was about fifty when I realised that what happened to me at school is called bullying.
6. I was born in London, but spent the first eighteen months of my life in a boarding school near Wallingford. I wish we could have stayed there.
7. If you don’t know the difference between “its” and “it’s”, you might cause me to tear out my hair.
8. I have a few grey hairs and I don’t care. (But I know I’m lucky in that regard.)
9. I like multi-coloured flowers.
10. I’ve only ever written one poem that doesn’t rhyme.
11. I find it hard to think of random things. I’m not a random person.

I Nominate

Only if you want to do this. There’s no compulsion.

• Carol @ My Writing Journal, who managed to make her A to Z posts about writing interesting, even to someone who’s read a lot of writing posts.
• Jennifer @ Tales from the Notepad, marine biologist, amateur historian and now an author, too.
• Ailsa @ The Bingergread Cottage, author, yarn-freak, teddy-orphanage matron, motorbike rider, shaman, …
• Any other blogger who wants to take up the challenge. (I will add you to this list.)

Questions for Nominated Bloggers

1. How old is your blog?
2. What’s your main reason for blogging?
3. Does your blog have a theme/themes?
4. Do you have a blogging schedule?
5. Which sort of posts gets the most comments/views?
6. Which is your personal favourite of all your blog posts?
7. Do you write many guest posts? Why?
8. Do you host many guests on your blog? Why?
9. Have you/would you post self-made videos on your blog? Why?
10. What was your greatest blogging failure and what did you learn from that?
11. What about your proudest blogging achievement?

Again, thank you, Roland for including me in your list of nominees and many thanks to all the lovely bloggers out there.