Blogger award tag? What?

And now for something completely different! I got nominated for one of those blogger award/tag things (in this case, a Liebster Award) by this lovely individual, and since this is BEDA and coming up with post ideas is freaking hard, man, I’m going to do it. Maybe you will learn something about me that you don’t already know. Not that that’s very hard, since I don’t have a whole lot of personal information on this site (and I like it that way). Here we go!

1. Why did you start blogging?

I started blogging toward the end of my college career, when I realized that my future was staring me in the face and it didn’t include deadlines. While this blog is named after the Douglas Adams quote “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they fly past,” which is certainly a tongue-in-cheek kind of love, I actually genuinely love deadlines. I work better with them. Without deadlines, I would never get anything done. The idea in starting this blog was to create deadlines for myself, so that I was always writing something. In practice it has not been as successful in getting me to write as I had hoped, but it’s still better than nothing, and I quite enjoy doing it despite all my whining about what a pain in the ass BEDA is. And once I started blogging, I realized I actually had a lot of Opinions, so it’s been a good way to vent about All Of The Things.

2. Two unknown facts about you.

Well. Options abound on this one, since y’all know almost nothing about me (except for my parents–hi parents!). Here are a couple random facts:

1. I’m a black belt in Tae Kwon Do. I earned it when I was 16, after eight years of study at my dojo. And yes, I can break boards with my hands, but that’s really not as impressive as it sounds. The trick is to aim through the board instead of at it, and it only hurts if the board fails to break. My training also included nun chucks and knife fighting. In eight years of martial arts training, the most valuable piece of self-defense information I learned was to run away at the first opportunity, because honestly even if you win the fight you can get yourself into a whole hell of a lot of legal trouble if you hurt your attacker. That goes double if you’re in a knife fight. In fact, the entire goal of a knife fight is to get the other person to drop their knife so that you can also drop yours and minimize damage to both parties. Continuing to defend yourself with a knife when they’ve dropped theirs is a felony.

2. I’m really bad at video games. It’s not that I don’t like them–I think they’re a really interesting and totally valid storytelling format, and I enjoy watching other people play them so that I can experience them vicariously–I just really, truly suck. The level of video game suckitude I have achieved can only be described as miraculous. There’s something about trying to navigate a three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional screen that just doesn’t translate for me; all of my considerable hand-eye coordination goes completely out the window the second you put a video game controller in my hand. I was once defeated in Halo by a set of stairs; all I had to do was get to the top of this staircase in the allotted amount of time, but instead I just repeatedly fell off the stairs until time was up. In high school, melee play on Halo always turned into who-can-kill-Morgan-the-most-times–a game I thwarted at every opportunity by repeatedly committing suicide. In case you’re wondering, the fastest way to commit suicide in Halo is to regenerate with the rocket launcher and immediately fire it at your feet. People still love to play video games with me, though, because I swear like a sailor, which I hear is quite entertaining.

3. One embarrassing childhood story.

Geeze. I don’t know. “Embarrassing” is relative; I mostly just think stories about me being stupid are funny. I was not what you call a self-conscious child. I was loud and proud about just about everything, and most of the things I was could probably be considered embarrassing. I loved to start blunt conversations with strangers, including once when I was a toddler and I asked a black man what was wrong with his skin (thanks for the internalized racism, largely white neighborhood!). I had a unique sense of style, which at one point meant wearing multiple layers of clothing, including up to twelve pairs of socks simultaneously. The working theory was that I could just take off the outer layer of clothing every day and then I wouldn’t have to waste time changing my clothes. In daycare, I once got a rock stuck in my nose on purpose. My favorite clothing item in middle school was a pair of purple overalls with brightly colored embroidered flowers. I liked to wear them with a green striped t-shirt. I also once participated in a two-girl lip sync performance of Video Killed The Radio Star at middle school spirit week that couldn’t have gone more disastrously. Do any of those count as embarrassing?

4. Nominate your own bloggers (up to five) and give them your own questions.

Well, I gotta start with my blog pact ladies, so:

1. Making My Own Worlds – Alexandria Darcy Alex is the kind of writer who understands the value of genre fiction. She loves her paranormal, extra terrestrial, steampunk epic love stories and makes no apologies for it, which is refreshing when so many other writing bloggers (myself included occasionally) get all up on their high horses about “Literature”. Zero pretentiousness–just good, fun entertainment. She’s also disciplined as hell, which always wins snaps from me.

2. Anne Bean Anne’s blog is basically a treatise on how to not suck at writing. She loves to talk about craft, and delve into the deeper implications of common story tropes (especially where gender is concerned, and always with an eye toward comics). Her blog is also a great resource for finding intelligent, well-crafted indie comics that are worth checking out, because she somehow manages to always have her finger on the pulse of the comic book world.

And, to round it out, another writerly friend of mine:

3. Writer With A Shotgun – C. Page C. posts pretty intermittently, but when she does, it’s well worth reading. Most of her posts are thoughtful meditations on life as much as writing, and they can often serve as prompts or motivation to get writing, or even to re-examine your projects and figure out what’s working and what isn’t. She’s only been blogging for a couple months but she’s already turned out some great material, so you should definitely check her out.

And now for the questions. Since all my nominees are writerly-types, I’m going design my questions accordingly:

1. What was the first book/poem/play/movie/comic/other work of art that really spoke to you?

2. What is your least favorite work in the generally accepted Western literary canon, and why? If you had the opportunity to delete it, would you?

3. Name three tropes that you hate, along with an example of a work that used them well.

4. Name your own nominees! (up to 5)

Well, that was a fun way to burn another day in BEDA. Thanks again to Lin for nominating me and saying nice things about my blog! Regularly scheduled programming returns tomorrow.

Egomaniacally yours,
M.M. Jordahl

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