blogger recognition award

Evening beautifuls!

How have you been? *gives you all an elephant hug*

Today I’m going to be doing the Blogger Recognition Award which the amazing Autumn nominated me to complete. By the way, have you seen her photography account? No – it’s brilliant!

The rules for the Blogger Recognition Award are as follows:

1. Thank the blogger who nominated you and provide a link to their blog
2. Write a post to show your award
3. Give a brief story of how your blog started
4. Give two pieces of advice to new bloggers
5. Select 15 other bloggers for this award
6. Comment on each blog to let them know you nominated them and link to the post you created.

My story:

I discovered the love I had for reading when I was in Year Two. At that age where I had yet to encounter stress,  I had the appetite of a horse and would gobble up plot lines left, right and centre. I remember how on our weekly trip to the town centre, my mum would pop into Wilkinson’s with me, and we would come out with a couple of Enid Blyton books. (they used to sell each book for a pound, you know the yellow books with colourful spines that had a collection of mini stories inside them?).

Honestly, I am so blessed to have such a supportive mother who buys me books, and encourages me to enter writing, drawing, and photography competitions. If she sees something that connects to my interests, she’ll fold the page down, or rip the notice out for me and tell me all about it.

I kept multiple journals as a child, although I cringe to read  them now. They were so boring and my drawings were so bad! In Year Four, we had a task to rewrite a chapter from Prince Caspian, and that was the first memory I can remember where I put so much effort into drawing and writing at the same time. My writing sucked though haha. Fast forward to Year Six, I discovered that I loved writing poems and creative pieces. However, I didn’t enjoy the non fiction tasks or the write a report tasks.  I entered the school story competition and won. Here’s a little extract from it and can I just mention what a wild and weird imagination I had when it came to creating names – especially for villains.  Oh and I had a habit to shove big words in for the sake of it…whoops?

And I think at that moment I realised that I wanted to write. That I loved writing and creating new worlds where anything and everything is possible. As is tradition in England, I moved school aged 11, where I met my best friend who introduced me to Wattpad. Until I got permission from my mother to join, I used to write on word documents for an hour or two on end. Then I finally got to join Wattpad where I published a few stories and deleted a few stories. The two novels I’m working on that I’m somewhat proud of are Mere Existence and Kisses X.

Somewhere down the line, I stumbled upon weebly and wix and attempted to create blogs there but it didn’t feel right so I left it. Then one day I decided to create flawedsilence on wordpress and haven’t regretted it ever since. Sure sometimes I totally disconnect myself from the virtual world because I need a break, but this blog is always going to be a part of my identity. And I appreciate all of you for being part of my family.

I started my blog because I wanted to reach out to people who were both similar and different to me. I wanted to have a small impact on people who live in a zone where it is night when it is day for me. And finally I wanted to make people think and smile. I think my introduction page explains better the whys of this blog. You can read it here if you wish.

Advice for You:

1. Write for yourself.  Write from your heart, your dreams and your tears.
2. It’s okay to take a break from blogging. Sometimes  all you need to do is disconnect from the real and virtual world and spend some me time to recharge yourself. Yeah your problems might not be sorted, but everything makes more sense because you feel lighter as there’s less pressure  to conform to when you’ve disconnected from the bustle of real life.
3. Design your blog to reflect you. Not what others want to see. For example, my blog doesn’t really have a niche, could be described as random, and pretty simple in terms of design. And to be honest, that doesn’t bother me because I love the setup, and this blog is my way of self expression. So please let your blog mirror your awesomeness.

(I know it said two pieces of advice but I decided to be a rebel)

And I nominate all of you reading this to complete this Award, unless of course you wish not to.

Have a great weekend everyone