Thousand Movie Project was nominated last month for Best Local Blog by the South Florida Bloggers Union, which was an honor all on its own because it suggests that a good amount of the blog’s followers took time outta their day to go on the Bloggers Union site and nominate me—but it was also kinda where I expected things to end. I looked at the fifteen competing blogs and a lot of them are more attractive, more topical, and the authors are considerably more photogenic.

Voting ended on January 30th and I found out on the 31st that Thousand Movie Project is a semi-finalist for the award, which narrows the list of fifteen nominees to five, all of whom’ll be in direct contention for the award, which’ll be given out on February 9th at a ceremony.

I’ve never really been up for something like this, and I’m not quite sure how to process it, because while on the one hand I wanna savor the compliment and sit comfortably with the idea that, whether I win or not, I’ve got a network of followers who care enough about the blog that they’re willing to put up some time and effort to nominate and then vote for it, and that’s about the most flattering thing in the world.

But now that the blog is in the semi-finals, it means that a panel of judges are looking at it, evaluating it for its appearance, the strength of the writing, and I guess kinda just determining whether it’s interesting; and this, in turn, is kind of anxiety-inducing cuz I’m like, Shit, shit fire, now I need to go into overdrive and produce a ton of content and it’s gotta be extra salacious or locally-minded, etc.

The appropriate course of action, obviously, is to just keep doing what I’ve been doing, writing about whatever I wanna write about and to be honest about it and try to make it interesting—but that, too, seems kind of stressful on its own because, without really saying anything about it formally, I took the month of January to kind of ignore the blog and focus instead on the novel I’m writing (which I’m glad to say is mostly finished).

So now there’s this panel of judges popping onto the site like, “Wazziss?? He hasn’t posted anything in a month!”

It’s also kinda stressful because, having gotten so little traction with the Thousand Movie Project book proposal last summer, part of me is thinking that it’d be a huge help to be able to write, at the top of that same proposal, that this book’ll be an adaptation of South Florida’s Best Local Blog 2019.

Which again sparks up this idea that I’ve gotta throw things into overdrive.

Whatever the case, that’s what I’ll be doing: for the next few days the blog will be getting back into gear with new posts coming every day (sometimes multiple posts a day) for the foreseeable while.