7×7 Link Award! Me? Really?

Last Thursday, Kris Atkins awarded me with a 7×7 Link Award. Thanks Kris! What’s a 7×7 Link Award? I’ll tell you–and pay attention: you might be getting one next (keep an eye out at the end of this post)! The recipient of the award has to select one of their own blog posts for each of the seven given categories. He or she then selects three of their favorite blogs as award recipients, then those bloggers have to do the same. It’s like someone saying, “Man, your blog is so totally cool, but I feel like I’ve missed some of your finest moments. Please share them with me!” That’s how I like to think of it anyway.

So, without any further ado, here are the categories, and the winners:

Most Beautiful: I can spot beauty (my wife and kids for starters), but I’m not really good at creating it, at least graphically. I think I’ve written some nice stuff, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. So I think this will have to go to my first Road Trip Wednesday blog, featuring my favorite book cover. Not necessarily what you might think of as a “beautiful” picture, but it does have an elegance and style worthy of the award.

Most Helpful: This, I think, will go to my blog series, “Thoughts and Tips on Querying” (I’m linking to the first in the series–you can filter by category to see them all). I had been doing a lot–and I mean a lot–of reading on the subject, and I kept coming across people asking the same questions and making mistakes I knew were mistakes because of all the reading I’d done. So, I decided to do this series as a way of putting all this information somewhere where, hopefully, it will be of use. So it was intended to be helpful. I have no clue if it actually was or is.

Most Popular: This one is a little easier to determine, especially since I’ve been keeping stats on my blog. If “most popular” means “most hits,” then that would be my Road Trip Wednesday offering “Best Supporting Actor Goes To…” In terms of most comments, that’s definitely this past Wednesday’s RTW post, “The Journey So Far…” Road Trip Wednesday has been good to me. Let’s see if we can beat the comment count this Wednesday! 🙂

Most Controversial: Controversy is in the eye of the reader to some extent. An early article I wrote called “Are You a Christian, and a Practicing Atheist” had (and maybe still has) the potential to ruffle a few feathers.

Most Successful: I think this will have to go to my Romans 3:9-18 post. Some of you may know that I am posting study notes from the Sunday School I’m co-leading on Paul’s letter to the Romans (class on Sunday, notes posted usually on Monday). The class started on September 11th, but our first actual day of study was September 18th. Since we had been studying Romans before the summer, we were going to be starting back at Romans 3:19. My challenge was to post study notes for Romans 1:1 – 3:18 before September 18th. And I managed to do it. So–SUCCESS!! And there’s a nice table in that post that I’m quite pleased with. 🙂

Most Underrated: I think my Saturday Song Share from last week was underrated. What’s not to love? Some Billy Joel, some performance notes, and a personal story too! But not many hits, and I don’t think any comments. Perhaps everyone was gone for the weekend? Or maybe no-one goes online on Saturdays? Anyway, I thought it was good. I considered doing more “Saturday Song Shares” like that, but since that one crashed-and-burned like lead explosives (I just made that up–can you tell?), I didn’t even blog this past Saturday. So tell me. Do you want more “Song Shares”? Comment and let me know!

Most Prideworthy: For this one, I’m selecting my Book Title Poetry entry for the competition literary agent Janet Reid ran last month. I’m not a poet, but I thought this wasn’t a bad effort. I didn’t win, but I got an honorary mention for the fact I only had to supply two words to complete the poem.

So there they are. It would be interesting if regular visitors could choose pages for each category, but that could get messy. And depressing–my brother has better things to do with his time.

Now we come to the part of the show where I select three bloggers whose sites I think are worthy of this award, and who will then have to find posts for each of those categories. And the winners are…

• EmmaMarie.com: She’s British (in the broadest sense, since she’s actually Scottish), loves tea, and writes, so you know she’s cool (and my wife loves Scottish accents, so that’s another point in Emma’s favo(u)r). I’d be interested to read her list of winners, and I think you will too.
• Over Yonder…: I know I tagged Bailey for the blogfest, but I enjoy reading her posts and would like to see which ones she chooses.
• Jaime…: Because she’s Canadian and so she also knows how words are supposed to be spelled. (As you can tell, I’ve conformed my spelling to American-style. That’s what happens when you’ve lived and written here for nearly 20 years. Y’all.) Again, I would be interested to see which of her posts she picks for these categories.

Hopefully these three lucky winners will be posting their entries soon. A good excuse to be sure you’re following their blogs so you don’t miss it.