Once again, I’ve been nominated for an award. And let me tell you, it’s an off week when I don’t get told on the entire internet how great I am. Usually it’s for something like being the only person willing to flash her ass on a video chat platform to raise money for a sick kid, but that’s what makes me a force to be reckoned with.

Seriously, I got nominated for an award and then I forgot. Not forgot I got nominated, because I was all jazz hands about someone liking my blog, but forgot how to find out who nominated me and what I’m supposed to do about it. Nothing says, “I appreciate your respect and your kind words,” like having to dig through your Twitter contacts because you vaguely remember that some guy whose gravatar was of a man in a striped shirt looking to my left wrote a whole blog post about five great writers he likes. Sorry, Awesome Guy Who Nominated Me! I really do appreciate you!

Seriously again, I was nominated for the Liebster Blog Award by Adam Martin and there’s a really great story about how he was one of the three people who bought my book that month AND had the nerve to tell Twitter that he was actually reading it. I was so grateful for his 99-cents that I wrote back and told him I would send an autographed copy of the print edition. (I left out the part about how I have boxes of these things lying around the house…I plan to give them out to the children at Halloween this year, just to save on the candy budget.)

Now I have to nominate five other blogs, so here goes:

Vinnie The Vampire. Because it’s great and because I can’t do that. It’s so cool how there are pictures and it’s on a website, but I don’t know how he gets comics on his website. And it’s completely oozing with teen angst, if the teenager in question was a vampire and had to put up with all the people in a regular vampire’s life, but if they were vampires, too. “Back in my day, we didn’t have juice boxes of blood, we had to bring down our own victims! Vampires these days have it too easy, I tell ya!” or something like that. I don’t think I have the accent right because they’re probably from Transylvania or Minnesota and plus they have fangs, so they probably lisp.

Tears of Crimson. The whole blog kind of creeps me out, but in a jealous rage kind of way. She has this iPod on the side of the screen that plays music that sets the tone for her books, and all that stuff. I can’t even get my blog to put the pictures in the right spot. Anyway, Michelle Hughes writes this schmexy vampire stuff, but that’s not the cool part. The cool thing is I found her on Twitter and she lives in a tiny itty bitty town that makes my tiny town look like New York and her town used to have its own dog. The whole town. They shared one dog. And they named him Fred. More jealous rage over their dog.

Fear Not The Darkness. Again, creeptastic stuff on her site, but Sheilagh Lee is the absolute best person to know in the whole world of being a writer and trying to use social media without looking like an asshat. She is so supportive of everybody she’s ever heard of and just basically is made of win. Gladiator-style win. The kind of gladiators who actually won their fights in the arena and looked all hot like that guy from The Immortals, not the actual historical gladiators who got crushed to death when their chariots flipped over. Those guys were gross looking.

Write Now. Let me explain to you how much I hate poetry. If the only thing I could ever read for as long as I live was poetry, I would stage my own book burning and roast marshmallows over the crackling flames of dying books. But I have a really good excuse for it (author’s note: it’s not a really good excuse, but I did have a bad experience with poetry once. No, it did not involve a man from Nantucket.). NOW, if I DID like poetry, it would be Aileen McGhee’s poetry. Her poetry makes her look so serene and happy, not like she’s about to drive her car through a crowded McDonald’s like I always look.

What’s A Little Fan Fiction Between Friends? Okay, don’t get mad at me. I know,some people consider fan fiction to be more than a little bit like stealing and other people go so far as to consider it a lot like tossing live woodland creatures into a roaring fire to listen to their screams of agony. Personally, I feel a little sad for people who get so caught up in the lives of characters from a book or movie that they begin to envision all kinds of other stories about those fake people, because there’s a thin line between imagining a fun story line and setting a place for Draco Malfoy at your dinner table every night. HOWEVER, you could actually argue that fan fiction means a reader LOVED your book so much that they couldn’t just let it go when it was all over, so it’s also supremely flattering (or it’s a real bitch slap, because it could also mean you didn’t do it right and they had to come in and fix it. Forget I said that.) Anyway, this site has some awesome fun fan fiction from all kinds of books, movies, and TV shows. The best part of it is you have to click to agree that you’re over 14 years old, so you just know there’s some good sexy stories.

So there they are. The winners. Or non-winners, if you take into consideration the fact that the only reason they won anything is because I thought they were awesome. Trust me, you never want me to be the one vouching for you or being your only character witness or anything. But congratulations from me to you!