Hey, guess what, friends? The awesome-beyond-awesome Hayley Knighten nominated me for the Liebster Blog Award! Thank you so much, Hayley <3

I’ve seen this award bouncing around the blog-verse for a while, and I honestly think it’s a truly neat idea. It has helped me discover tons of excellent new blogs, and I’m excited to be able to nominate 11 others and spread the word about their blogging adventures.

So, before I get to that, apparently I get to chatter about myself 🙂 Here are eleven facts about me:

1. Occasionally I have lucid dreams in which I can fly.
2. My favorite holidays are Halloween and New Year’s Eve
3. One of my life-goals is to hike the entire Appalachian Trail.

   

4. I have always hated the sound of creasing paper, and yet one of my favorite hobbies is folding origami.
5. One of my baby teeth never fell out.
6. I am a hopeless fan of snail mail, particularly with fancy wax seals.
7. My alter ego’s name is Hannah Barbeck. I’ve been interacting with her since early childhood.
8. I have a rather elaborate inner world where all of my characters exist outside of their individual stories. They all interact with each other, discuss various heartaches of being characters, and eat all of the pizza rolls ever. Hannah moderates this space for me.
9. I have an old railroad spike, upon which I collect my rejection letters. It’s cathartic, what can I say?
10. I spout off quotes from movies all the time.
11. In college, I would pull all-nighters in the math building so I could use the chalkboards to plan out my writing endeavors.

These are my answers to Hayley’s questions:

1. What is your favorite book?
   That’s… so difficult… I guess if you define “favorite” as “most influential” I’d say the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
2. How long have you been blogging?
   A little over a month now. And it’s been an unbelievably fun experience so far! Connecting with other bloggers and bouncing ideas around about characters and reading has been a blast.
3. Where do you buy most of your books?
   Second-hand bookshops, mainly. Or yard sales.
4. Do you have a preference for books written from a certain point-of-view. Which is it and why?
   When it’s done well, I really enjoy books in first person, present tense. I just find them so engaging and so easy to really feel close to the main character. I also really love any book that experiments with multiple POV’s.
5. Who is your favorite literary character?
   Right now, it’s Daenarys from George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series. Watching her evolution has been one of the most rewarding aspects of these books for me.
6. What upcoming book release are you most looking forward to this year?
   I do believe Tamora Pierce is gifting us with a book about Numair this year…
7. What was the last book you read all in one sitting?
   Lilies of the Field by William E. Barrett. Okay, yes, it’s short, but I found it just so delightful.
8. What really popular book or book series have you still not read?
   The Wheel of Time, by Robert Jordan. I have been slowly acquiring these books through yard sales, etc for a few years, but I’d rather not start reading until I have the whole collection.
9. Do you participate in NaNoWriMo or Camp NaNoWriMo?
   Why, yes! I am actually camping right now. (Really super behind, granted…) I love the camp atmosphere. It’s so relaxing and supportive.
10. What is your favorite genre?
    I’m definitely Team Fantasy! I like all aspects of Speculative Fiction, but my heart will always be with realms of magic and ballads and grand feasts and quests and prophesies and zero machinery.
11. What are your writing and/or reading goals for this month?
    Weelll… Originally I was supposed to use this month to work on editing a Trilogy I’ve been chipping at for the last two years. But after the Central PA Comic Con I just attended, I decided to take a break from the Trilogy, and return to a long short-story I wrote years ago. I’d like to expand it into a novella, so I’m really overhauling the existing plot and replacing it with something which is (hopefully) much more engaging. This one is actually one of my experimental pieces, and science fiction on top of that, so it’s definitely going to be a mental break from the Trilogy, which is classic high fantasy, and I think my brain really needs that to break out of my editing rut.

And now my favorite part! Here are eleven awesome bloggers. Perhaps you have been lucky enough to stumble on their musings already, but if not then I would most definitely recommend you give these blogs a look:

1. Off the Cuff
2. Nine Pages
3. Each Star A World
4. Ripped Out Pages
5. Elizabeth Corrigan
6. Pen, Paper and No Plan 
7. Miranda Sard White Writes
8. Kristina Writes
9. Neal Timothy
10. Twintype Books
11. Andrew Knighton 

So, lovely nominees, if you’re the type who enjoys answering odd little questions, I have some for you 🙂

1. What is your best tip for Writers Block?
2. Pick a random word from the dictionary. What does it mean to you?
3. What are you most likely to plant in a garden?
4. If you could live in the fictional world from any book, where would you go?
5. What do you do to get yourself into ‘writing mode’?
6. What is the closest green object to you right now?
7. What is a skill you’ve always wanted to learn?
8. What office supply could you absolutely not function without?
9. What is your favorite activity that does not require any kind of technology whatsoever? And just to make it interesting, let’s exclude reading or writing.
10. What fictional character (either your own, or someone else’s) would you most like to accompany you while doing the above activity?
11. If you wrote a story about you, your fictional friend, and this designated activity, what would you title it?