This one was surprisingly difficult for me. I’m still very new to blogging and I’m still finding it as overwhelming as it is exciting. Steph created the Six For Sunday challenge, and this quarter’s prompts are here!

The bookish community:

The first of these is super obvious. I love the bookish community, on wordpress but especially on twitter where I interact the most. The readathons, buddy reads and other challenges have transformed my reading, and I’ve also recently started the Queer Book Crew book club. Talking to everyone on our discord is an absolute pleasure. I never would have thought of starting a book club if it wasn’t for getting into blogging. The community is one hundred percent my favourite thing about reading and book-blogging, and I don’t think I could go back to reading quietly by myself.

Writing book reviews:

Despite what my shit-posting on twitter might suggest, I actually really enjoy writing book reviews. I’m a very quick reader, so it’s easy for me to read a book and move on without processing everything I read, which is definitely not fair on the amazing books I read. By writing reviews, I have to reflect on what I’ve read a lot more, and I’ve found myself being more thoughtful about my reads. I also love that books linger with me now, and I’ll still be talking them weeks later, and focusing on specific aspects of books that I love or hate.

Sharing recommendations:

People??? Ask me??? For book recs??? This makes me SO happy, I can’t even explain. People asking me to recommend them books to them is the best thing in the world to me, and every time they do I feel a huge spark of joy. I’ve also been palming my books off on people now that I’ve started reading more (a side-effect of blogging, even if it’s not specifically a blog thing) and I will never love anything like I love when people are like ‘oh wait what was that book you were talking about?’.

Practising my writing:

I’m not the most consistent blogger, and I definitely don’t write in a professional way (whoops) but I am enjoying writing with regularity, and practising writing with a voice. If I can get used to writing with my voice, maybe one day I’ll be able to write with another voice too, and then I’m halfway to a decent character (I’m good at plot, I’m bad at characters).

Using my time productively:

Okay, I’m such an inconsistent blogger. I spent most of today (as of writing this) stressing about a review due in a couple of days. But when I have a good day off, I’ll write a handful of posts and get them all queued and feel myself free to read whatever I want, whenever I want. That’s really satisfying to me. Once I get on top of my review copies, I’m looking forward to getting my TBR to a less stressful state. I also like having something to do in my evenings. My anxiety is worse when I have nothing to do, and now that I’m not at uni, that happens quite a lot. But I can always write a blog post, and that seems to be helping me manage my anxiety (most days).

Big Dopamine Energy:

I should validate internally, but I don’t! So there’s a lot of joy to be found in people commenting on and liking my blog, and in people responding to me on twitter when I talk about my book reviews and opinions. It makes me very happy to get interactions on here, even if my blog is pretty small (which I kind of like, because I’m inconsistent and it means I don’t have to stress about ‘my schedule’).

See you next week for the next Six For Sunday!