Follow Friday - The Coolest Airplane in the World Is the SR-71 Blackbird

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - The Book Reaper and Ed and Em's Reviews.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: What blogger inspires you? It can be any kind, it doesn’t have to be a book blog.

I'm going to pick a few, all have inspired me in some way or another:

Twenty Sided by Shamus Young: I started visiting Shamus' site when he was doing his DM of the Rings web comic spoofing Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies by presenting them as a series of role-playing game sessions. But I stayed for the content. His insightful commentary on video game development. His ability to explain how programs work. His humor. And so on. He is aided by a couple other people now, mostly the other people who appear on his Spoiler Warning show. But what reading his blog inspired in me is the realization that you should blog about what you love, and if you do that, you will turn out interesting and engaging material that will keep people coming back.

Whatever by John Scalzi: Scalzi has been blogging for what seems like forever. His blog archives go back to March of 2002, and extend back to before Old Man's War was published. His blog, however, has been active since 1998, which in blogging terms seems like the Stone Age. I wonder if he had to use clay tablets for his earliest entries. Back to before he was the SFWA President. His blog is a catalog of a journey from an interested fan who happened to be a skilled writer, to a published science fiction author, to the head of the SFWA, detailing all of the happenings that took place along the way. Entries from his blog were used to make the very funny, insightful, and enjoyable book Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded. Scalzi's blog is named "Whatever", because that's what he writes about. He inspires me to write about what I want to write about with the knowledge that good quality content will be appreciated. He also inspires in me the belief that one can, if one is persistent enough, go from being a good writer of fan fic to being a good published author.

Julia Barrett's World by Julia Rachel Barrett: Julia seems to read and comment on more blogs than I can count. And at the same time, she manages to keep churning out fun posts on her own blog and a number of novels. Julia inspires me to try to do more. Seeing her balance the myriad of demands on her time and still be able to write books as good as Captured (read review) makes me think that I could do more, if I just tried a little harder. Not only that, when she stops by this blog, she always leaves great comments, comments which make me strive to do better when I am writing posts.

Kris Writes by Kristine Kathryn Rusch: Kris writes about a lot of stuff, but her most interesting posts, from my perspective, are her posts about being a working writer. More than almost any other writer, she is open about how the publishing industry works, how she has dealt with bad contract terms, how she has dealt with lousy editors, good editors, difficult people, and so on. Anyone who aspires to be a published author, or who just wants to be informed about the crap their favorite authors probably have to routinely deal with should read her blog. She inspires me to write more stories, because someday I want to have to deal with the snake pit of the publishing world that she describes.

Parajunkee by Parajunkee: Parajunkee is the doyen of book bloggers, at least among the book bloggers I am aware of. She, of course, hosts this meme, but what she does that inspires me are her Book Blogging 101 posts in which she freely and happily gives other bloggers advice on how to make their own blogs successful. More than anyone else, Parajunkee makes me regard the book blogging community as that - a community. And a large part of the reason it functions as a community are the actions of people like her. Parajunkee inspires me to be nicer and more generous. I don't always succeed, but she inspires me to try.

Go to previous Follow Friday: Psalms 90:10 Measures a Man's Life as Seventy Years

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: Seventy-Two Degrees Fahrenheit Is Room Temperature

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