A Blog Mystery & 12 days of blogs

             Before I begin my article for today, I want to take care of some business.  Tamika from The Write Worship passed this award to me,

The Heartfelt Award and that was certainly thoughtful of her to do. Be sure to visit Tamika's site if you aren't following it already.   Thank you, Tamika, for your kind recognition of my blog.

              A couple of weeks ago Journaling Woman gave me the lemonade award and I wanted to say thanks to her and acknowledge her fine blog.

         So I will bring this all together by also, at the same time, participating in the 12 days of Community challenge.     L.L. Barkat is hosting a challenge to encourage bloggers to engage in 12 days of community, featuring other bloggers on their personal sites throughout the month of December. She  suggested this on the High Callings Blog.    I may not be doing the 12 days, but I reguarly recognize deserving blogs like I am doing today.   

 

           So I'm bestowing this award to the following friends and I will do it in conjunction with recognizing some other bloggers in our community.  And the recipients are asked to pass this on to some of their blog friends so they can gain some blog promotion as well.   Here are 6 blogs that I frequent often:

Life, Uncharted     Poetry, musings, thoughts

Heim Binas Fiction    Carrie's going to talk about her stint as a child actress today-- would you miss that?

Random Thoughts     From Iowa, just what the title says it is.

Lit Diva   needs some more followers -- show that you care.

Marsha's Musings   the musings of an aspiring writer.

Beaded Bear    Sig talks about beading, but I read her for her writing. 

          Check them out and I apologize for all of the other fine blogs if I haven't given you an award yet.  There are so many writing sites that I look at everyday with so much helpful info that I couldn't list them all here, but you could always go to my profile and check out the list.



          Now to the mysteries.  Today, since I'm doing blog promotions, I''m going to recommend some blogs that probably don't want me to give them any awards, but I think they deserve to be recognized and checked out.
 
           Do any of you ever search through the blogs based on what the blogger's interests are?  I do this occasionally and come across some very fine blogs that very people seem to look at.  They have few to no followers and few to no comments.  Perhaps it's not a great mystery, perhaps they choose not to network. But why go to the trouble of writing what no one reads?

           Sometimes I run across blogs that seemed to have been going strong and then just stopped, many as far back as a few years ago.  I've never really investigated to see if there are any clues as to why they stopped.  Did they lose interest?  Did they die?  I'm sure it's frustrating to some who want to be read to keep posting and never get any comments.  I guess some people just lose interest in their blog and stop posting entries.

           Do you get discouraged about blogging sometimes?  I admire the persistance of those who stay with their blog even when they don't believe anyone reads.  And I admire those who read the blogs and put in their comments, even if it's just a few words of encouragement.  On my Thursday blog I was very impressed by those who stopped by and left very substantial comments.   Thanks to all of you --my gratitude is no mystery. Some of you good readers might like to go back to read those comments-- they  are quite good. Feel free to leave yours as well.

So in closing here are three sites that I enjoy and I hope more people go to check out:

http://who-am-i-who.blogspot.com/     Dr. Harris Stern, a psychologist from Philadelphia blogs about writing personal memoirs. I like his concept but I wish he would get some more followers to encourage him to post more. 

http://stephentmccarthysstuffs.blogspot.com/           I keep trying to tell people about Stephen because he's the one that got me into blogging and I'd like to see him get more readers and commenters. Don't let his sometimes seemingly cynical (realistic? honest?) view of things scare you away. I think he's a really clever writer with a unique sense of humor and he deserves to be read. He's been doing this blogging thing for a few years now.  He's really a smart guy who makes me think and teaches me a few things.     Maybe I'm kind of weird, but that's what I think about that.

http://whatatholwrote.blogspot.com/       This is Athol Dickson's blog which I discovered when I did my interview with him that appears on my blog post for Wednesday 12/9--if you haven't read the interview please check it out and leave a comment. He's a great author and we writers should give him the recognition he deserves. He doesn't post often of late, but after all he's a full time novelist and he's got a lot of other writing to do.

            There you go.  Please do me a favor and check these last three blogs and while you're there leave an encouraging comment.  If nothing else just pop in and say that Arlee Bird sent you.  And if there's anything you don't like about these blogs let me know what it is.  If there's something you do like I then I would like to know that as well. After all, I'm still in Blog School and I'm still learning the ropes here.  I want to know what works and what doesn't.  We are a communtiy and we should be willing to help each other.