Very Inspirational Blogger Award 2013

Franny Stevenson recently gifted me with her latest blog game. The Very Inspirational Blogger Award. It's been a couple of years since this one has come to The Bathroom Monologues, so I was curious how the rules had changed. They are:

1.) Display the award logo on your blog.  
2.) Link back to the person who nominated you. 
3.) State 7 things about yourself.
4.) Nominate several other bloggers for the award.
5.) Notify those bloggers of the nomination via comments.

Not too complicated. These "state things about yourself" rules have gotten trickier, as by now I believe I've revealed at least a hundred things for various awards. I've decided to go with seven reading facts in anticipation of my first book shopping spree in three years, coming up this weekend. I'm very excited.

1. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World was the first book where I stopped fearing for first person narrators. Though being chased by terrifying dinosaurs, I realized he had to survive in order to tell me the story. Teen revelations, man.

2. I found Homer's The Iliad remarkably easy to read at age 13 because it was so similar to big comic book crossovers like The Infinity Gauntlet. Love for the latter turned into love of the former.

3. I think Thanos would side with Hera.

4. A college professor once gave me a copy of Saul Bellow's Seize the Day because the main character reminded him of me. I read it in a weekend and have seldom been so offended. He had no idea why someone would be offended at that.

5. I read Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes From the Underground while bedridden and alone one Easter weekend. I laughed a lot at the disparity between my actual outlook and his whiner.

6. I read Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman in a hospital while waiting for my senile grandfather's cat scans to finish. The play startled me with how accurately it depicted one of the ways I mistreat people. Ever since, I've been keenly interested in fiction that might make me a better person.

7. No didactic fiction has ever done what Death of a Salesman did to me.

One change is that we can now nominate any number of people. I'm going to keep this to three, and to people I haven't awarded before. I hope they can do fun things with it:

1. Beverly Fox is an old college friend of mine, and a very sweet person. She's been figuring out what she wants from writing for years. As of April, she's determined to work at it every day, and has quite the streak of posts on her blog, between fiction and some remarkably positive non-fiction.

2. Alex J. Cavanaugh is one of the most inspiring people I met during A-to-Z, having built such a network around himself. He's always cordial and visits a staggering number of blogs per day, inspiring me to try to up my game.
3. Colin F. Barnes is a more recent friend of mine via Twitter, and has one of the most ambitious 2013s. He aspires to write one million words and has been pacing himself insanely, churning out project after project and submission after submission. That he has the finger strength left to tweet is inspirational in itself.