The day I accepted it...

So I have been given an award, which is always the biggest compliment. To receive an award from someone who has a blog that you so admire is a really fantastic feeling. This award came from the lovely Shibby from http://shibbysthoughts.blogspot.com/ which is a blog I really enjoy reading. As there are no rules for this award I thought I might instead tell you the story of how AI came to be as I don't think I have ever really gone into it before.

This blog really began because of a close friend of mine. She has this amazing blog where she takes a photo each day for a year, it is an idea she started on her birthday last year and one that is coming to a close pretty soon. The blog is really for her own personal enjoyment and I had long admired the dedication it took and the enjoyment she got out of it. I have always been really into art and I guess pairing images with words was inevitable considering I study English. Postsecret (http://www.postsecret.blogspot.com/) has long been an inspiration of mine, I have all of the books that Frank Warren has published and I read it religiously. So one day soon after we received our mod results from our first year at Oxford I had a really long conversation with my friend Anna. I think it was an important conversation for both of us, a chance to evaluate everything and gain better perspective on where we were in our lives. AmeliaIs... was born out of that conversation. Of course, like many blogs the initial few weeks were rocky and there were several times I almost stopped - I think it would have been desperately sad to look back on 10 secrets and see the potential for what it could have been. I persisted with it and as I included more of my friends and family in it the blog grew into a sharing experience. Now I share it with people I don't know and there is something deeply rewarding about the comments you receive from fellow bloggers, people who have little or no obligation to like AI but do anyway. Thank you to all those people - fellow bloggers, friends, family - who make my enjoyment of creating secrets infinitely greater than it would be alone.

Now to pass on the award. I am really quite rubbish at following rules, so to stick within that tradition I am only going to nominate one blogger. Not because there aren't a million and one fantastic blogs out there, but because I think this one (new on the scene) blogger deserves it...and a little bit because he is my lovely friend, but mostly because of the blog. So I am passing the award on to Pete's new blog http://nobleartofexpression.blogspot.com/. This is a really cool blog that I really love to read, so check it out.

Sorry for the long post. Have a great Sunday, enjoy!