Awards Season

Golden Globes: ha!

Tonys, Academy Awards: don’t make me laugh!

The People’s Choice: huh? wasn’t that a 1950s sitcom featuring Jackie Cooper and a talking Basset hound named Cleo?

You can have all of them. Roz Morris, of the imperatively named Nail Your Novel blog, has offered Running After My Hat not one but two awards. I accept them happily, on the blog’s behalf. (It couldn’t be here tonight itself.) Here are the trophies:

Spiffy, eh?

Of course, with great rewards come great responsibilities. And because this actually combines two awards into one, it comes with a double burden treat:

1. pass the Sunshine Award on to 12 other deserving folks; and
2. for the Fabulous Sugar Doll Blogger Award, tell your readers 10 interesting things about myself.

I’ll follow Roz’s lead and hook the two awards together. My Sunshine-Award notes will follow my ten-interesting-things list, with the caveat that one man’s interesting is another woman’s bemusing (a caveat particularly useful in our household).

In no particular order:

1. I’ve had a cinnamon-raisin bagel and a cup of tea for breakfast nearly every weekday and Saturday morning for the last 30(ish) years. On Sundays, I have a glass of orange juice first.
2. When I was a kid, I watched every single episode of two TV shows — Laugh-In and I Spy — when it was first broadcast, and never since. To this day, I wish I were as funny and insightful as Lily Tomlin and looked as cool in jeans as Robert Culp and Bill Cosby.
3. The only two times I’ve passed out, or believe I did, sharp bladed objects were in the immediate vicinity:

• The first time happened when I was in college. I’d just gone about 24 hours without sleep, after an all-night round-trip drive from New Jersey to West Virginia to pick up the older of my two sisters, who was away at college and wanted to pay our parents a surprise visit. The next morning, I was standing in front of the mirror, shaving… and then I wasn’t: I was looking up at the underside of the sink.
• The second time, I was living by myself in a small apartment out in the country. I had a wedge of orange cheddar cheese on the counter, which I was slicing very thin, and suddenly noticed that the red wax which encased the cheese was mottling the orange of the cheese itself. It wasn’t red wax, of course. When I stood up after the emergency-room repair and bandage, the nurse took one look at me and said Quick, lie back down on the examini—! I complied, all right: whomp.

4. I loooooove playing practical jokes. Too much, in fact. I have pretty much sworn off the really elaborate ones, but still get an inordinate kick out of kidding someone while wearing a straight face, and having them fall for it. (Especially if I hear that they’ve attempted to share the bogus information with someone else.)
5. The Missus teases me for believing my hair to be still brown. Some years ago, we were meeting a friend at some downtown nighttime festival, but we couldn’t decide on an exact location to meet up. (It’s always a mob scene.) She — the friend — told us that was okay: she’d be on the lookout for “John’s silvery hair.” You could have heard my jaw hitting the table from a block away. Silvery? Silvery? Me?!?
6. I latch onto words in my writing and then beat the hell out of them with overuse. A constant struggle. (Various forms of “bemuse,” such as earlier in this post: that’s one of them. Bemusement, as you can imagine, being pretty much a permanent state of affairs in my vicinity.)
7. I auditioned as an extra in the Richard Gere/Jodie Foster movie Sommersby, for which some scenes were being filmed in Virginia (where I lived then). They probably needed a hundred extras, and over the course of two days a couple thousand must have shown up. I didn’t hear anything back from them, of course, so went about making plans for a weekend trip to New Jersey. The night before I was to leave, behold: I got The Call. Ever after, I have not been able to believe I said no: “I’m sorry, I’m already packed for a trip.” (Leaving unsaid: …to do the same sorts of things I’ve done in New Jersey for my entire life.) The odds of my even meeting her, of course, were vanishingly small, but I will probably go to my grave thinking of Jodie Foster as a missed chance in life.
8. I hoard greeting cards.
9. Although I’ve been a computer and Internet professional for over 30 years, I’m in many ways a closet Luddite. (It took me a loooong time to get used to writing drafts of fiction with anything but a #2 pencil, on notebook paper.)
10. The Missus and I met online in 1991, on the old pre-AOL, pre-Web CompuServe system (TAPCIS, anyone?); I lived in Virginia then, and she, in Florida. I also had accounts on many other online services at the time, and was one of the original subscribers of America OnLine. When The Missus-to-Be also joined AOL, we used to play this multi-player game called Neverwinter Nights, far into the night. Our online usage bills — metered by the minute — were astounding.

Okay, now for the fun part: passing along the glory to 12 other blogs…

In January, I listed numerous blogs which I visit regularly and which continue to slay me with their consistently high quality (even those where the posting is less than consistent ;)). There were thirty blogs named there, though, and while they should all feel free to accept both these awards, at least implicitly [hint, hint: I’d LOVE to see your ten-things-about-me lists!], naming them all again seems to push the award guidelines a little too far. So let’s do it this way:

• Consider: not all the blogs I named back then can really fit something like this into their format or structure. For instance, the blogs of publishing-industry professionals can’t possibly accept every award thrown their way, or for that matter to meet all the “post about X” requirements. So that immediately trims down the list some.
• The “N interesting things about me” meme is common in other social-networking fora, like Facebook. If you’ve already done it there, why do it again on your blog, right? [hint, hint: not everyone who reads this post will be on Facebook etc.]
• You just may never want or get around to blogging about this.

So let’s leave it at that: if, per the Sugar Doll Award criterion, you do blog about your ten-interesting-things, and/or you do name twelve other blogs worthy of the Sunshine Award, feel free to grab the corresponding badge(s). And by all means drop a comment here in either case: I’ll know that you’ve done so (because I read you folks every day), but other visitors here may not!

Note: Not listed in January, because I didn’t even know of it then, was Roz’s Nail Your Novel blog itself. Please don’t let my crime of ignorance be yours, though — not if (as I am) you’re a writer who always feels eager for help and intelligent discourse. Certainly, while you’re there, avail yourself of her free Nail Your Novel e-book offer! (It’s a 1.9MB PDF.)