Hello everyone, it’s me, The Blog Complainer. Having fun are we? I wish I was!

A potential epic three-parter or a set of three Blog Complainer posts is currently in the works and my obvious uncertainty and other technical jargon is pushing that project back for possibly another week. In the meantime, I was going to save this for later, but oh well, I got another WordPress blogger award guys!

I have received a few these awards in the past, everything from being seen as the most versatile blogger to walk the Earth, to having the sun shiniest personality on the website, but after just over two years on this website I’m now finally being recognised as a blogger.

This may be surprising, but there are actually eligibility rules for these online awards. It’d be like receiving your first ever Oscar, but if you wanted to take it home you must perform a successful back-flip and eat extra spicy curry in front of the whole audience. These rules aren’t that bad, they’re actually quite endearing, and once you hear them it’s kind of a fun social interaction in a game where everyone is immediately a winner as soon as they’re invited to the party.

1: The first stipulation is you have to thank the blogger who personally chose you and 14 other lucky bloggers.

Thank you Sally or 18 Cinema Lane, it’s very nice of you to give me another digital award. I also have to leave a link to her site, which I would recommend if you enjoy Hallmark movies and she also hosts these blogathons celebrating classic cinema.

2: Now I need to explain the origin of The Blog Complainer. I think I’ve explained this before, but I guess I can do it again, it’s quite an interesting tale.

Before the BC I was none other than Cameron Black, a young kid who was kind of just told ‘Hey you know movies, why don’t you review them?‘ and I was like ‘Good idea!‘ My journey started on a website called Movies And Quotes and More. Despite what the title suggests, you can write movie reviews on there. While fun to make, I felt unsatisfied putting them up there. For one, the site was quite inconsistent with how long it would take to moderate your review and also there was a chance they might ignore it all together. By May I was done with them when they rejected my Avengers: Infinity War Review. Now all I wanted was to be my own moderator, my own boss, be free to be as grumpy as I wished and clearly know who is checking out my content, so that’s when I needed my own website and a good name, which I basically made-up on the spot!

3: Next I need to give two pieces of advice for fresh eyes wanting to join the field.

Alright, I’m not much of an oracle or a sage at this blogging stuff, but my advice would be to remain open minded. You could stick to just focusing on one thing for your whole blogging career, like what I do, movie reviews or something else, but to me that’s going to sound pretty uneventful and boring after two years of nothing but just that.

If people know you for just one thing, they’re more likely to keep eating it up, because repetition is the key to success, but your passion for it will not be the same as when you released your first ever post. So I find every once in a while doing something a bit different to break the same old cycle is a good way to keep you passionately active while also introducing some new creativity into your site. My best examples would be my award show The Crammys, a short story with nothing but my own illustrations  Patty Vat Cupcake and this very post. These may not perform as well as other posts, but I think it’s a necessary evil to satisfy your sanity. But you never know, sometimes your audience can surprise you.

Break the monotony is my advice and my other piece is if you’re in it for the money then consider putting links to your blog everywhere. I learned this lesson from my Disneyathon series, people just like clicking on things. It must be the fascination of where might this particular link take you.  What’s that I see, a link! Click here to go somewhere super awesome on this very site!

4: The final rule is I need to choose 15 other bloggers to also do everything I just did. I’m not going to sugar coat this but, let me explain why I’m not doing this.

I’m currently following just under 15 bloggers and I’m not the type of person that actively checks out every single post all 15 of these people do, if I did then I might forget about my own blog. Also when I did this in the past I always felt very awkward when I had to choose 15 people because one, too many people in my opinion, two what if they have done it before and lastly I always felt like I might have been bugging people by linking their site and asking them to do this award challenge.

I’m sorry I am quite self conscious when it comes to other people and I never liked doing this in the past, so if I ever get picked for one these again reduce the nominee count. So I’m leaving my 15 spots open to whoever hasn’t done this before and wants to see what it’s like to get your blog some recognition. I guess also leave a link so I’m notified and we can be pals and stuff.

So does that mean I don’t get the award? I have been basing all this off Sally’s post and it never said anything so … alternative rules will be in play.

That was a good distraction and hopefully an entertaining post. Back to grinding out that other future post I mentioned at the start. Want to try this out for yourself or want to do it all again, rules are above and be my guest. I would love to see people’s reactions to this maybe controversial post. Alright, I’m the Blog Complainer and we’re done here!