In the last couple week’s I’ve been nominated for several different awards posts, and have been slow about actually doing them. Starting this week I will try to slowly work my way through them. First up: Blogger Recognition Award!
Thank you to Don’t Shush Me! for nominating me!
What is the Award?
The name pretty much gives it away. This award was created by Edge of Night to recognize other bloggers and their contributions to the blogosphere. As with many of these awards, it’s a cool way to let other bloggers know you appreciate their efforts, as well as help others discover blogs they may not be reading.
The Rules:
1. Select 15 other blogs you want to give this award to. Do some digging if you have to! Find those blogs. (And no tag backs!)
2. Write a post to show off your award! Give a brief story of how your blog got started, and give a piece or two advice to new bloggers. List the person who nominated you, and include your award in the post!
3. Comment on each blog to let them know you’ve nominated them. Provide a link to your award post.
4. Provide a link to the original post on Edge of Night. This way, anyone can find the original post if needed, and we can keep track of the award’s origins.
My Origin Story:
It has been a long slow road to where I am today on this blog. I’ve been some sort of blogger for as long as I can remember – Xanga, Livejournal, MySpace, Blogger – you name it, I tried it. This blog has gone through many incarnations before WordPress became it’s permanent home in 2009. Then it went through several more makeovers before arriving at what you see today. I’m a writer at heart. I love to write and share my thoughts and opinions. For five years I would post sporadically to this blog on an extremely wide variety of topics, but never consistently. Sometimes a year would pass between posts.
In January of this year I made a resolution to post at least once a week. My topics were still on a wide variety of things, but I was finally posting consistently. I stuck mostly to topics that I’m fairly passionate about, meaning things that I tend to fangirl over – television, movies, celebrities, and books. I had finally arrived at a place where I felt good about my blog and I was starting to build an audience.
However, over the summer I decided to put my blog through one more makeover. While I enjoy writing about a variety of topics, my favorite thing to post about was books. And I started noticing that my book-related posts were the ones that seemed to be the most popular as well (with the exception of my Supergirl review, which is my highest viewed post ever). So, I decided it was time to transition into a mostly book-related blog. I’m sure I’ll post about random things once in a while (because let’s face it, I am a random person) but for now it’s all about the books and I’m really enjoying. I’ve also really enjoyed discovering other book lovers and bloggers in the past couple months.
My Advice:
I am a terrible one to give advice to other bloggers, because I definitely did everything wrong when I first started this blog, but here’s a couple things:
- Make. Yourself. Write. This pretty much goes for anything if you want to be any kind of writer. You have to force yourself to sit down and just do it. Even if what you’re writing isn’t great, you still need to write. I made myself post at least once a week this year, and it has developed into a habit. Now I’m posting several times a week and I bought a whole planner last night just so I can plan out my posts. But the first step is to just sit down and write. Start with once a week. Then build from there.
- Write what you love. Again, this is pretty generic advice that anyone could give you, but it’s so true. If you’re not passionate about what you’re blogging about, then you won’t care. And don’t worry about being judged for it. I won’t hate you if you don’t agree that The Princess Bride is the greatest movie ever made (we won’t be able to be friends, but I won’t hate you).
- Connect with other bloggers. The accountability thing actually works. Plus, I feel a lot more inspired to blog more when I’m regularly reading other peoples’ posts. Also, those bloggers may give you ideas for ways to improve your blog and your writing. Additionally, if you sign up for a weekly post meme, such as Top Ten Tuesdays by The Broke and the Bookish, it’ll not only help you to discover lots of other bloggers, but it also helps make sure you have at least some piece of content to post every week. Then your once-a-week post is taken care of and you can start planning other posts.
I Nominate…
And now comes the hard part, because I never know who to nominate for these things. Also, I’m afraid I’m going to break the rules here. As I stated above, I’ve been nominated for three of these types of awards in the past week or so, and each comes with a rule about nominating 10-15 people. That’s nearly 40 blogs when you add it all up! That’s a lot of blogs. (Unless I just nominated the same ones each time, but that feels like cheating.) So, what I’m going to do instead is nominate five other blogs for each of these awards.
Not Another Dumb Blonde 