Creative Blogger Award

After spending a very hectic weekend meeting several of my favorite authors at Charleston’s Young Adult Literature Festival, I find myself coming down with the sickness. What better way to recuperate than to get some writing in? Recently you may have noticed that I finally have a few other staff members working behind the scenes with me. Our latest addition, Alyssa DeMember, runs her own baking/recipe blog and works as a freelance editor. Alyssa & Co. have long been active readers of OOTWW and have been throwing support my way for years, so I’m excited to have her on the team! Last week we received a friendly fun nomination for a Creative Blogger Award from Alyssa’s Breakfast Café and decided it would be a good idea to do something more personal for a change. The rules for the nomination are:

•  Thank the blogger who nominated you and link to their page
•  Share five facts about yourself
•  Nominate up to 10 other bloggers and provide links to their pages

I guess I’ll start by saying how much I appreciate that people read this blog, period. Alyssa and people like her are always the emotional boost I need to keep things in motion when I hit writer’s block or start doubting the direction I’m going with all of this. Alyssa has been a solid supporter. I’m thankful to have come across her, and it made me happy to hear that she thought this blog was interesting.

The Facts:

1.   Promotional writing is a small part of my interest in literature as a whole. While many of my English/literary peers tend to be concerned with subjects like grammar and British literature, my focus is on the literature we are creating right now. Ever think about how much writing is produced in places like Facebook and Twitter? Maybe it seems irrelevant to us now, but I guarantee you future generations will pull from these sources in order to learn more about how we lived and what we thought about. Ever considered video games to be literature? I have news for you: they are! As the gaming industry has grown to epic proportions, the interest in creating deep stories and convoluted plot lines has created a higher demand for the employment of writing teams. As we create games, pieces of who we are and how we think are incorporated into them. They will be studied.

2.   I spent most of my life working for my family’s construction company. I’ve been carrying bricks, mixing mortar, and using heavy machinery since I was pretty young. My childhood was one where we worked far more than we played. I’ve put myself and my wife most of the way through college by working in some kind of construction field. I’m the first in my family to pursue writing as a career, and one of the few to complete college.

3.   I LOVE small businesses. Whenever I learn about a locally run place, I rummage through whatever information I can find on the internet about them and then go visit them in person if possible. We have a store called Veggie Bin in town that has tons of locally grown produce, my wife and I shop there as often as we can. I like discovering people who are just starting out and I enjoy helping spread the word.

4.   I love kids! I feel like kids know things that we don’t. They have such unique perspectives on the world. There have been several times where a child has said something that I thought didn’t make sense, only to later realize how insightful they were being. While I don’t have any offspring of my own yet, I love being able to take part in the lives of the kids I come into contact with in whatever way I can.

5.   I interview for other publications, too. Some notable interviews I’ve done recently were with Yellow Submarine animator Ron Campbell and YA author Victoria Aveyard for the Charleston City Paper.

As for my own nominations, I enjoy reading the following blogs:

Berry Music Blog

Indie Habit

Arcadian Atlas

Gamespresso

Video Games as Literature

Teenmusing

One “Stef” at a Time