Happy Blogoversary Jill-Elizabeth.com!!

So there won’t be a post tomorrow – you get one today instead because it’s my BLOGOVERSARY!!

Blogoversary is one of those fabulous made-up words (teehee – I’m not the neoterist this time, but I’m freely using some other neoterist’s word!) that I only learned about once I started spending a lot more time on the Internet. There are a lot of those things, actually, and today in honor of the one year anniversary of my blogging presence, I am going to share some of those things with you.

Sidebar: It’s unbelievably hard to believe (yes, I know that sounds funny, cut me some slack – I’ve been writing blog posts for a YEAR already… teehee again) that it’s been a year already – at the same time, as I’ve said previously, it’s hard to believe it’s only been a year. Wild.

Okay, without further ado, I bring you A Random Smattering of Things I’ve Learned Because of Jill-Elizabeth.com!

1. I am a weird blogger. This is not really something entirely new – I knew I had weird tendencies before in general; the new part is learning that I’m weird with writing too.  Sigh.  Honestly, I started writing blog posts whenever the mood hit me, aiming for three per seven-day week as a means of getting my butt in chair to start writing fiction.   When I realized I was having trouble maintaining self-discipline of any kind with this willy-nilly approach to posts – and when I realized people were actually reading what I was writing – I started writing five days a week, Monday through Friday.  I did this for a long time until I realized that I was blogging more than fiction writing, which is when I went back to three per week but on a regular schedule – i.e., the current approach.  The down-up-down numbers are interesting to note primarily because of the way they’ve changed how I write.  I started by writing the post and then immediately posting it.  Then I started writing posts in spurts, saving the spares, and picking one to post each day.  Then it shifted to writing posts in spurts, scheduling them a week in advance, and then when those ran out, writing more.  Now – and for the past several months – I tend to write and schedule three or so weeks of posts and have them all nailed down in advance.  This isn’t really what blogging is supposed to be, as I understand it, but as my life has gotten busier and my time has become less my own, I have found it to be the only way to make sure posts are live on time.  Good thing I don’t write news or current events, eh?  As I said, weird…
2. There are a startling number of ways to get free books online.  And it’s corollary: Book reviews are more like book reports than I ever would have imagined. When I started blogging, I was looking for topics to write about (I still often am, actually), and stumbled upon Book Blogs, a great online community of book bloggers – which I learned mostly meant book reviewers.  Lo and behold, I learned that there are an untold number of people getting free books in exchange for providing their thoughts on said books.  Seriously, I thought I had stumbled onto the world’s biggest gold mine.  Free books!  People wanting my opinions!  A “job” reading books I want!  I posted a few reviews, contacted a few publishers, got some free books, posted some more reviews, started getting contacted directly by authors and publishers looking for reviews…  La la la, it was great – for a while.  Then I realized I was spending all my time reading the books other people were asking me to read instead of the books I wanted to read/had on my own “To Be Read” (TBR) list.  Now don’t get me wrong – I’ve read a lot of amazing things that I would probably never have stumbled upon if not for the blog/book review thing.  I wouldn’t trade those for anything.  I’ve also made some cyber-author-friends who are great and helpful and supportive about my own writing.  All very very good things.  But I’ve learned that too much of a good thing is, well, not so good.  Sure, it’s great to be able to tell The Husband that I can’t fold the laundry right now because I HAVE to finish this book, it’s work!  (teehee)  But the downside to that is that I not only have to finish all the books, even when they turn out to be not great or not what they claimed to be, but then I have to write reviews of them.  Even when I didn’t like them or have a hard time finding something nice to say – and even when I like the author but didn’t like the book.  And that’s not so great.  Plus, I’ve learned the hard way that sharing my opinions is one thing – writing up defensible and clear explanations as to why I hold those opinions (which I try to do in my reviews) is quite another.  And that “quite another” is quite challenging – and time-consuming – sometimes, as is writing a summary of the story/plot that gives enough information to let the reader understand the review but not so much that it spoils the story (challenges I don’t recall facing in Mrs. Leonardo’s third grade class when book reports were due)…  Seriously, I didn’t intend to become a book reviewer – at least not this often.  But somehow I have – and I’m not always sure if that’s the best thing for me right now.  It takes up a LOT of time and shifts my focus off of my writing  – and sometimes, gasp shudder, makes reading into WORK!
3. Fame is fleeting, as is bliss. Teehee, how dramatic that one sounds.  I don’t know that anyone – myself included, believe me – would ever call what I experienced “fame”, but the point stands nevertheless.  When I started blogging and promoting my blog, I was getting hundreds of hits a month and new visitors and members and lots of people signing up for my giveaways and making comments and all of that good stuff.  I’ve noticed a serious flagging of said interest over the course of the year though, and am choosing to blame it on the adage about fame instead of anything I might be doing less well…  😉  Seriously though, I don’t know what the deal is.  I don’t know if it’s winter doldrums, changes in the Internet reading climate, or changes in my own blogging/posting habits – or some combination of the three – but things have not been quite as dramatic and, well, fun lately.   I don’t get the same rush from a new visitor or comment – now it takes three or four or seventeen to get me good and excited.  I don’t know if it’s the shift in what/how I post – there have been a LOT of book reviews lately, virtually no fiction, and less musings/original writing than in the early days.  This has been explained (but I shall repeat it, for those who missed it, and the explanations in order are: because I owed the authors their deliverables, because I’m trying to “save” my fiction for publication – see #4 below, because I seem to have no time to just sit and ponder what I want to say to the world in a non-fiction writing context), and while I think the explanations are valid – it’s not just that I’m lazy, I swear – that doesn’t really mean anything if I’m not delivering what the people want, now does it?  And figuring out what the people want isn’t very easy either, especially given the incredible amount of information/commentary/entertainment options available online…
4. Publication requirements suck. (teehee)  Seriously – this is one of the most annoying things I’ve learned while blogging/writing fiction.  I get that a publisher doesn’t want me to give away my book (if I had one finished – sigh) for free online because that would make it very difficult to justify him/her charging $26.95 in hardcover, $11.95 in trade paperback, $7.99 in mass market paperback for it.  But I honestly don’t see how my publishing two or three short stories on my own personal blog renders them ineligible for publication anywhere else in the world.  Seriously – I’m flattered that potential publishers think my blog audience is so big that it threatens their ability to sell books, but come on…  If it weren’t for publisher requirements, I would post a lot more original fiction online.  I could get more comments/feedback that way, publishers could learn how many people find my writing style/topics interesting, and I could build a bigger audience for them to market my books to downstream.  At least, that’s how I see it…
5. One nice word can change everything. This again isn’t really a new lesson, but something that I’ve had reinforced in the best possible way over the past year.  I have been amazed at how happy I get when someone tells me they loved something I wrote or found it moving or funny or telling or true or relatable (another Jillism, sorry).  It makes my day – no, my week.  Writing is a thing you do alone in a room for most of us – when we finally decide to let someone into our room to see our inner workings, and they say something supportive/helpful/encouraging/complimentary, well, our inner selves do a happy dance (or at least mine do).  So please know that the two seconds you take to write a comment are appreciated well beyond the two seconds it takes me to read it!!  And yes, that’s a shameless hint that you should comment below…….  😉

So thank you to everyone who has helped make this past year a success for me – I really do appreciate it more than you’ll ever know.  Can’t wait to see what the next year brings!

Jill-E