The Blissful Adventurer - 2012 Blog of the Year

Imagine my surprise when I clicked on the link from Cara Olsen to her outstanding blog This Little Light and saw she had selected me among a few of her very talented peers as Blog of the Year for 2012. Cara herself had received the honor and as the protocol dictates shared her love and recognition with other writers she admires in the same vein. Cara, as many of my readers already know, is a novelist/blogger of exceptional mettle and integrity. Her work proves one can have faith and a firm grasp of the human condition and that they are not mutually exclusive. To be chosen by such a talented scribe is truly a blessing in these end of 2012 days. Thank you Cara Olsen. You are blessed and blessed with good taste :-)

If I owe my blogging success of 2012 to anything (besides my wife) I owe it to photography. As a storyteller by nature I have always been equipped with the capacity to recount some snippet of day-to-day usually with a modicum of entertaining banter. When blogging grabbed me by the sack in late January of 2012 it was my images that kept the story alive on the days when I simply had nothing clever to pen. The picture worth the 600-800 words blog became my staple. From photos I derived Haiku, Photo Essays, and the most beautiful breaks and chapter shifts in my fiction.

Photos also have brought Juliet and me even closer to one another. As evidenced by the many images we have shared together on the blog, my wife has quite the eye for photos. Juliet aka Schmee is a painter and designer naturally inclined to aesthetics. She embodies the beautifully feminine as a counter to my lumbering masculinity. Juliet is a daily blissful adventure for me. In these difficult days for our nation I cannot help but feel closer to my talented wife than perhaps I ever have.

This journey in 2012 was the most isolating of my life. I am and have always been a very social creature. 7-10 hours a day alone at a desk expecting to create is new to me still. My fellow bloggers assuaged many of my loneliest days with their comments, questions, and simple likes. I love attention, gratification, and applause. I was a theater major and an actor for most of my formative years. Now, I create in a different capacity and the discipline to do it wanes and waxes. My fellow bloggers are the keys to my waxing. I grow because this community embraced my work, told me where I was going astray, and mostly just let me be the me I am without the pretense of a common work environment. 2012 was the year of the blogger.

Travel, eating, and telling stories. Texas, Italy, Colorado, and California were the primary subjects of 2012. However, it was Asia and Hong Kong that got me freshly pressed! If there is any award more gratifying and ultimately more damning than being freshly pressed I do not know what is in this sphere of endeavor. I would welcome the opportunity again of being featured and I would hope this time I would not get my hopes up to remain so popular and to judge each of my posts on whether or not they received 600 or 800 views.

I went to Italy in the midst of my Freshly Pressed frenzy and the frenzy faded. When I launched my new blog above, the frenzy simply died. It damn near killed me and my spirit to believe my work was simply a quid pro quo entity. I started to consider for a bit the idea of giving up my goal of being a writer because clearly my work was a flash in the pan. My new website which is rarely seen remains my hope for this blog. At the same time I began to post again here on Wordpress because I missed the audience. I missed the daily interaction with friends. I missed the life I had leading up to being Freshly Pressed. Now I am hopeful I can rekindle some of the blogging spirit and energy that got me out of bed each day. I hope my work will once again be appreciated by new friends and shared across the web.

So here I am, Blogger of the Year. I accept this as truth because it is the best year of blogging of my life. My best work as a blogger, writer, photographer, and husband has been in 2012. I am so very proud of the over 150 posts I crafted in 2012. I am proud of the life I lead and the stories I tell.

As usual, I am going to deviate a bit from the rules of the blog. Know if you select me for a blog award I may take it, but I am always going to do with it as I see fit. Rather than issuing my own "Blog of the Year" award. I am going to post tomorrow with my blogs and people of the year and how they make me and this world better.

If you are a Wordpress blogger you do not want to miss tomorrow (which happens to be my birthday)

Huge thanks to all of you for reading me in 2012!

Michael