The Very Inspiring Blogger Award

It feels so rewarding! My blog, which is centered around themes of creativity in art and writing, has been in existence for barely a year, with traffic sky-rocketting to 8,875 visits during my launch event last month--and now it has been tapped by fellow author and blogger Colette L. Saucier for the Very Inspiring Blogger Award. 

Colette has been writing poems, short stories, and novellas since grade school. She devoted fifteen months traveling to Britain and researching Regency England, as well as vampire lore and literature, to complete her first full-length novel 'Pulse and Prejudice.' Colette is also the author of 'All My Tomorrows,' a modern tale of 'Pride and Prejudice' for the twenty-first century.

Seven things about me:

• In high-school I wrote a research project about the Israeli poet Uri Zvi Grinberg, who was politically out-of-fashion at the time. As a result, I received a failing grade for this project. The failing grade could have been corrected by taking an exam, which I refused to do, on principle. This meant never finishing my matriculation requirements for completing high-school requirements.
• I earned my B. A. in Architecture and Town Planning from the Technion in Haifa, Israel,  my M.A. in Architecture from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy NY, then my M.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Michigan.
• Never having learned the proper technique for breast-stroke, I taught myself to swim using my own 'technique', swimming underwater for three strokes and coming up for a breath on the fourth.
• My first book was a collaborative poetry project with my father, the poet, artist and writer Zeev Kachel. It was published in Israel and is now out-of-print.
• My career spanned several professions—first as an architect, and later as a software engineer, software team leader, software manager and a software consultant, with an emphasis on user interface for medical instruments devices. The longest stretch of work was my eight years for Philips Ultrasound, developing a high-end ultrasound machine that never made it to market, because the company went out of business. This experience gave me the fine detail for the scene in my novel, Apart From Love, where Anita's womb is being scanned.
• I travelled to China, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil.
• During this last year, I published four books: Home (poetry and prose), Apart from Love (a novel), Ropes, Separation, Tear (poetry, Hebrew Edition) and A Favorite Son (a new-age twist on an old yarn of a biblical story.) Single-handedly, I designed the book covers using my own art, formatted the text for print, and converted it to ebook format.

My choice of inspiring blogs you will want to check out:

• Ao Bibliophile 
• Joss Landry
• Bill Zombiezak Snider 
• Rossandra White
• Deborah Batterman
• Jeff Whelan 
• Bathsheba Daily
• Renee Pierce Williams 
• Carmen DeSousa 
• Sherri Christian-Samson 
• Patricia Macias 
• Roy Roy
• Ia Uaro

The Rules:

•     Display the award logo on your blog.
•     Link back to the person who nominated you.
•     State 7 things about yourself.
•     Nominate 15 bloggers for this award and link to them.
•     Notify those bloggers of the nomination and the award’s requirements