Lacuna Moon

Kerryn wrote about how she’d thought pretty seriously about quitting the blogging scene about a week ago.

I can sympathize — I’ve “quit” blogging as many times as I’ve quit smoking and I was more successful with the smoking.  But then, I realized that I didn’t have to blog in the traditional sense (as young as the “tradition” is at this stage of the game).  You see, the problem is that I like writing.  I don’t much care if anyone reads what I write, but I like to write — and I frequently do it with complete abandon and very little of the looking backwards and editing what I’ve written, with little apology for typos and fragmented sentences left in the rubbish.

For the most part, I write to get my outré thoughts out in the open so I can reflect on those thoughts a little more critically than I might if I just let them play the same record over and over in my head as I ask the gods why I have an overactive brain that just won’t let things go long enough to let me sleep.  If I write them down, they can’t be forgotten, which means that I can forget the thoughts for a few hours of sleep.  Therapy, then, is the reason I write.

I post those thoughts online for no other reason than the fact that there might be someone out there who thinks something similar and feels very lonely because they are told that they are strange or silly or just plain weird.  If they read my drivel and feel less alone, if they feel like someone shares their thoughts; I have succeeded in my one and only goal (aside from being able to sleep at night).   Humble goal for humble writings.

I never claimed to have any sage-like qualities.  I don’t even pretend anymore (although I thought I was the shits a couple of years ago, I have gotten over that illusion).

So, imagine my surprise as I read about Kerryn’s conundrum (“to blog or not to blog, that is the question!”) and see that she is re-evaluating her approach to writing a blog and, in the process of the re-evaluation — she has nominated me for the “Thinking Blogger Award“.  This is an award that goes out to those blogs that cause a person to think, for even a moment, about things a little differently (or a lot, take your pick).

Aghast!  Me?  Think?  I think entirely too hard, but it doesn’t mean that its thoughts that anyone would (or should) share.  Mindless brain ooze, that’s a better definition of what I write.

The horror…

Now that I’ve been “tagged”, however, there are few options left…  I must either maintain the chain or “something horrid will happen to your family and/or friends, should the chain be broken”.

Seriously, I like the idea, because a year or two ago, I bemoaned the lack of non-traditional blogs out there.  I ran into too many that were bitch sessions, monetizing tools or daily diary drivel (these irked me perhaps more than the monetizing tools because I was bored as well as annoyed).  At the time, I griped that I wanted something different than the low-substance blogs I was encountering more and more frequently.

We should nod our heads to those blogs that grab out attention.   My nominations for the Thinking Blogger Award go to the following:

a small stone — it is the simplicity of the blog that captures my attention.  Fiona Robyn does an excellent job of capturing a moment of a day, concentrating it into a few words (sometimes snippets, sometimes a poem) that make me raise an eyebrow and leaves me hungry for more.  This site of hers is haiku without the mess or the structure.  I always wonder if I’m not paying enough attention to my surroundings after she has posted.

Neil Gaiman’s Journal — maybe you know his writing and maybe you don’t.  Regardless, Neil’s site fluctuates between more mundane matters to serious questions regarding being a librarian or a comic book store owner.  This isn’t your typical writer’s blog, more concerned with promotion than with conversations — the exact opposite is true.  In fact, it’s not uncommon for Neil to tell you about a hot clearance item of his book in between his Q&A sessions with fans that sometimes show a side of the writer than you don’t expect to see.  Perhaps he doesn’t need an award, but gol’darn’d it — he does get me thinking some days.

N8ey — sometime I agree with N8ey, many times I don’t.  But, while much of his old material is gone (from when he went missing and then reappeared with a new version of his site), there are many times that I had to think long and hard about discussions that came up at his site before I responded to a comment to my comment.  N8ey swears like a sailor, but he often has a point that is hard to arbitrarily reject (hint — N8ey, bring the expounding back, puh-leeze).

Repeated Expletives: — sometimes a little too intense, even for me, Jake, iSirkus, et al. have some in-your-face points to make and I am regularly impressed with their thought processes.  A touch of nihilism (but not the romanticized nihilism) and a healthy dose of their namesake, this is definitely NSFW.  But, they don’t want to be and you can shove that where you like.  All the same, they think and they’ve done their fair share of making me think a little harder about my world.

White Thoughts — I can’t forsake the person who nominated me.  Kerryn is part of my daily reads because she does get me to think a little about what life is like when live on the other end of the world and have interests that are different from my own.  I call it perspective.  She gets me thinking outside of my own limited interests and has gotten me to appreciate things like knitting and food in ways that I never really considered either (I mean…  knitting…. and I have an epiphany about her knitting a few months back).  Thanks for the tag, Kerryn — but you are a far better blogger than me.

There.  Five blogs that you might not visit if I hadn’t said that they will get your wheels turning (or may at some future point).