simpleek

My readers may already be aware of this, if you read my recent video game challenge post, but in case you aren’t, I’ll be cruising around Europe for about a week and a half starting this week. During this time period, my blog will be a little quiet until I return after the Fourth of July weekend. I should hopefully feel invigorated and a little less jet lag when you start seeing regular posts resume. For now, I’m going to take this time to address a shiny new blog award I’ve gotten not too long ago.

Cary of Recollections of Play has been so kind to nominate me for the Blogger Recognition Award! Thank you always to the amazing Cary for the nomination. You’re the best! There are some simple rules I need to follow for this award, and it goes something like this:

1. Give two pieces of advice.
2. Tell the whopper of a story about how my blog got started.
3. Nominate others for this hallowed honor.

When Cary accepted her nomination for this award, she presumed the two pieces of advice in the first part of this acceptance process was about blogging. I’m going to follow her lead in this one.

Advice #1: Write your ideas down. I think this is really important when you do writing of any kind, whether it’s blogging or doing creative writing. You never really know where or when ideas might just pop out of no where. Sometimes you might think of a really great idea for a topic to discuss in a future blog post, but if you don’t write it down immediately, what often happens is you’ll forget what that great idea was. This happened to me a few times in the beginning, but luckily not too much since my ability to remember things is still pretty sharp. Perfect memory or not, you should still write down your ideas. It doesn’t have to be a long paragraph. A few words or one sentence is enough to have a log of it somewhere for you to come back to when you’re ready to expand on it better. It has helped me on those days when I really had nothing I wanted to discuss for my weekly posts. Having an idea notebook, post-it, or wherever you like to keep your ideas in one place to refer to can give you a last minute topic to write about without really needing to rack your brain so much.

Advice #2: Remember to have fun. This might seem like strange advice to give about blogging, but it really isn’t when you think about it. You started your blog for a reason, right? You’re writing to express yourself and share ideas with other people. If you’re viewing blogging as a chore, something you have to do but not really something you want to do, you may need to go back and rethink why you’re blogging in the first place. It’s great to have followers and readers who consistently come back to read what you have to say weekly, daily, or monthly but if you’re not having fun or enjoying what you’re writing, then you’re only going to hate writing. What really matters is are you having fun maintaining a blog and are you enjoying what you’re writing about. As much as we all wish we can receive some kind of monetary compensation for keeping a blog, a lot of us are doing it for free and on our own time. Keep finding joy in blogging and do it because it’s a fun side hobby you do outside of work, school, or any other daily obligations you might have.

Now that you’ve got two pieces of blogging advice from me, it’s time to recount the story of how I got into blogging. I feel like I’ve repeated this story to death on my blog and in other places, but for the sake of this award, I’ll rehash it again.

I started blogging as a great way to have an outlet for my thoughts on the many geeky hobbies I enjoyed doing in my spare time. I’ve also loved writing for most of my life and I figured keeping a blog will help me practice it and hone my craft. When it came time to figuring out which geeky hobbies I’d write about on a consistent basis, I realized I liked too many things to narrow it down. That and I hate to box myself into just one thing. My interests included books, movies, anime, manga, video games, and fashion. Having that many interests made me realize I could rotate posts on a weekly basis and people who visited my blog would find at least one thing they’d be interested in reading. That’s when simpleek, short for Simply Geek, was born!

To close out my acceptance of this nomination, I’d like to nominate the following:

1. Robo♥Beat

2. Games I Made My Girlfriend Play

3. Rhio’s Comics

Goodbye for now, everyone. Don’t miss me too much during my week and a half long absence, and check back with the blog at the end of the Fourth of July weekend for new posts!