Friday, October 5, 2012

Follow Friday - Alien and Star Trek: The Motion Picture Were Both Released in 1979


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 - Book Liaison and Angela's Anxious Life.
  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 do you hope to accomplish with your blog? Is it to one day become an author yourself, just for fun, maybe get some online attention, or maybe something very different?

The main purpose of this blog is to catalog and chronicle the history of science fiction and fantasy as I see it, mostly through the lens of the books and stories that have been honored, but also through looking at film and television. I have always loved science fiction and its cousin fantasy, but always in a haphazard way, in fitful starts and stops as I grab what is in front of me, and usually fall back on comfortable old favorites. But writing this blog forces me to approach the genres systematically, and allows me to engage in some of my favorite pastimes: analyzing stories, placing them in context, researching biographical information, researching historical events, and so on. A friend told me that writing this blog is the perfect project for me, because it will never be finished - I am an unrepentant tinkerer - and it manages to satisfy both my inner OCD (or more properly, CDO, with the letters in correct alphabetical order) and ADD (squirrel!) at the same time.

And I think that also explains why I don't say that I'm writing this blog because I aspire to be a writer, even though I do. Because I never seem to be finished with projects that I start. I have dozens of fantasy role-playing campaign worlds in various stages of completion. I have a couple of unfinished stories half written, or a quarter written. I have piles of notes of things that I will "get back to later". I rarely do, but I keep them around anyway. But a blog is different. This site is always in flux, and I can always tinker with it. In fact, if I stopped working on it, people wouldn't have a reason to come back for very long, because uncared for blogs become dusty ignored corners of the attic of the internet.

Fortunately, I will never run out of source material for this blog. Even if I were able to double or triple my reading and reviewing speed, I would still have more books and other media on hand to go through and comment on that I could reasonably hope to accomplish in my lifetime. So I suppose the culmination of this long-winded answer is that the purpose of this blog is to give me something to work on, and to end up with a living, endlessly growing catalog of the best of genre fiction (and anything else that I happen to decide to throw in as well).

Go to previous Follow Friday: A Typical Tarot Deck Has Seventy-Eight Cards
Go to subsequent Follow Friday: Phileas Fogg Went Around the World in Eighty Days

Follow Friday     Home

6 comments:

  1. Great response! I love blogging! New follower!
    Stop by MY F&F?

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  2. @Hannah: I think that loving blogging is one of the most critical requirements for being a successful blogger. To do it right takes a fair amount of work, and if you don't love doing that work, you're just not going to stick with it.

    I would love to stop by four Follow Friday, but the link you provided doesn't seem to work.

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  3. Hello, fellow science fiction addict and historian! I too love, love, love science fiction and fantasy and enjoy blogs that feature it. I started writing because of role playing games and wishing I could explore further in some existing universes. :) New follower alert.

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  4. @Tali Spencer: I also love role playing games. I just wish I had more time to play.

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  5. You have certainly piqued my interest. :) I don't read as much science fiction or fantasy as I'd like; you have a great goal.

    New follower. My FF: http://moonlit-librarian.blogspot.com/2012/10/feature-and-follow-friday-oct-5.html

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  6. @Moonlit Libarian: I don't read as much science fiction and fantasy as I'd like. I think this a function of the fact that there are only twenty-four hours in every day.

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