The Sunshine Blogger Award

To whoever created this award, I love the name and picture! The Sunshine Blogger Award- it just sounds so… summery and cheerful. I desperately needed some cheerfulness right now.

By Emily in blogging awards on August 5, 2020August 13, 2021

To whoever created this award, I love the name and picture! The Sunshine Blogger Award- it just sounds so… summery and cheerful. I desperately needed some cheerfulness right now.

Thank you to Ruby Reads and Reviews for nominating me! Go check out Ruby’s blog; she writes really insightful posts about unique topics that I would never think of.

(I’m slowly working my way through the posts I’ve been tagged to do, so don’t worry if I haven’t gotten to yours yet; I am very disorganized, currently in a writing slump, and this post happened to be the closest one to publish-ready. So, since I didn’t have time to write a lot today, I chose to post this one first before some of the other tags. In short, if you tagged me for something else, don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten)

Rules

Thank the blogger who nominated you and link back to their page so others can see how amazing they are, too!
List the rules in the post and the badge somewhere on your website
Answer the 11 questions you got asked
Nominate 11 new bloggers for this award and let them know
Ask the nominees 11 new questions!

Answers

What is your preferred post to write (reviews, discussions, tags, etc.)?

I like writing pretty much any post that I’m in the right mood to write… I like writing reviews for books I have a lot to say about. I also like doing tags and award posts because they’re relatively easy and always fun. I do a lot of list posts as well; not so much recently, but I will probably be getting back to them since I won’t have quite as much time to read moving into fall. I haven’t done any discussion posts, but it seems like an interesting thing to try. I love debates/discussions.

2. What is something that you wished new bloggers knew about the blogging community?

Don’t feel weird or awkward commenting/liking/following other blogs; most people on WP are very friendly and enjoying reading other people’s sites. Leaving a comment is nice, unless you’re being spammy. I didn’t have my comments turned on for the first two months of my blog, but now I love getting comments.

3. What book have you bought because of the online book community?

Tweet Cute by Emma Lord; I saw a bunch of good reviews for this book, and I did not regret ordering it.

4. Do you have any hobbies that are completely unrelated to reading or blogging? If so, what are they?

A ton. I take piano lessons, I do competitive Irish dancing (however, I haven’t been to dance for four? five? months because of corona), I started an online tutoring business with 3 of my best friends this month- if teaching kids algebra counts as a hobby- and I also have done a lot of computer programming/app development.

5. How do you decide which books you want to review?

I don’t exactly have a system; I usually review books that I have exceptionally strong feelings about, or that are particularly mainstream or popular. It comes down to whether I feel like writing a review after finishing a book, so I guess it depends on my mood. And if I have strong opinions about said book, I’m more likely to feel like writing about it. Sometimes I’ll be writing paragraphs of the review in my head while I’m still reading the book, which is a definite sign that I’ll review it.

6. How long does it take you to write your average post?

I seriously have no idea. I write posts very sporadically…. I always start them, write the title or the first sentence, and then get bored and stop. Then, on the day I’m supposed to post something, I’ll dig through all my drafts and finish whichever one speaks to me. I have twenty draft posts right now. Twenty. Because I start and stop so much, I don’t really know how long it takes me to write a post. Sometimes, though, if I’m extra inspired, I’ll write an entire post in one sitting and feel much more on top of things. This one, for example, I’m writing early because I’m just in that kind of mood right now.

7. What are your thoughts on blog hopping?

Blog hopping- as in, surfing around WordPress and commenting/liking random people’s posts to find new blogs to read- I used to do it more often than I do now. I’ve found it really helps bring traffic to your site. I can definitely attribute some of my blog’s growth to blog-hopping, and I have found many interesting blogs and book recommendations this way.

8. If you could read any book right now (even if it’s not out or written yet) what would it be?

A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder Book 3! It’s not coming out until May 2021, though. I don’t think I can wait that long. It doesn’t even have a title yet 😦

9. Do you write outside of your blog?

The short answer is no. The long answer is, I used to be really, really into creative writing 3-5 years ago; I would write 40-page novellas about middle schoolers engaging in petty drama, punctuated by fairly unrealistic natural disaster plot points and dramatic one-liners. I’m not kidding about the natural disaster stuff; I wrote multiple stories about hurricanes/tornados because I had- and still have- a somewhat weird fascination with them. (I was thinking about doing a “reacting to my old writing” post one day because that would be interesting. Should I?). But around 8th grade, I gradually stopped writing because I could never think of anything to write.

I have this irritating mental block where every time I think about creative writing, my brain automatically goes “BUT YOU DON’T HAVE ANY IDEAS. YOU JUST AREN’T CREATIVE LIKE THAT” and then I can’t write anything that I don’t think is stupid. I really want to start up again ,though, and see if I can get rid of this block. I might be taking a creative writing class at school this year, so we’ll see.

10. What is the number one piece of blogging advice you wish that someone told you when you were just starting?

Post consistently, use tags, and use pictures on your posts to make them more appealing to readers. My first few posts were decent but got almost no views because I didn’t use any tags. And for the first two months of blogging, I posted completely randomly and used no pictures because I hadn’t discovered the WP free photo library.

11. Do you prefer to write reviews of books that you loved, or books that you hated?

Books that I loved. I rarely ever strongly hate books, and those outliers that I do hate, I hate too much to write a whole post about them. If I wrote a rant review, it would end up being really mean… so I just refrain from it.

My blog is full of rave reviews though, because when I really like a book, I always have so much to say about it. And I always feel so excited to write a review for a book I want everyone else to read.