Blogger Recognition Award

How sweet is this?  Miss March of Sunshiny Corner and The Elf of Willawa have both nominated me for the Blogger Recognition Award!  Thank you both :-)  I am honored.

The Rules:
-Thank the blogger who nominated you.
-Tell a little bit about how you started blogging.
-Give two pieces of advice for new bloggers.
-Nominate 15 other bloggers.

Fourteen Years -- Don't They Go By in a Blink

I started blogging 14 years ago this month.  I was 22 years old, had been married for four months, and had graduated from college the previous spring.  I was holding down my first full-time job and reading all the books I'd been wanting to read during college but never had time for.  Good times!  One day, I picked up a newspaper in my workplace's lunch room and read an article about these new things called "web logs" or "blogs" that had started cropping up on the internet.  Lots of people were experimenting with them, using them a lot like online journals that could be shared with other people.  The article mentioned several sites where you could get your own blog for free, and I copied down that list and decided to look into all this.  Hey, I was a writer, I had things to say, and other people might even want to read them!  Sounded like fun.

My first years of blogging are very much like keeping an online journal.  If you read back through those very old posts (and I'm not suggesting you do that, because 22-year-old me was kind of pretentious sometimes), you won't find me writing book and movie reviews as we think of them today. It's a lot of me just nattering about whatever I was into at the moment and felt like typing up a paragraph or two about.  Which I still do to some extent, but my posts are a leeeetle more structured now.  Also, back then you couldn't add photos easily, and I didn't know enough HTML to add them the hard way, so my old posts all look really blah to me now, lol.

If You Take My Advice...

Giving advice is tricky, isn't it?  I don't know what you, newer blogger, want to know about blogging!  My best piece of advice is to follow links.  If you've found a blog you enjoy, see if they have a list of blogs they like.  Most bloggers do, either in a sidebar (scroll on down a ways and you'll see such a list here on my blog, and a totally different set on my book blog) or on a dedicated page.  If you like their blog, chances are you might like some of the blogs they enjoy.  Also, when a blogger you admire does a tag like this and tags a bunch of other bloggers, see if they provided links to those blogs, because you might like those as well.

Then study the blogs you enjoy, figure out what you like about them.  Do you like their content, their writing style, their layout, the way they answer comments?  Learn from them!  Don't copy them.  Figure out how to make your own blog something that interests you.  Do you love reading movie reviews?  Write up your thoughts on a movie!  Do you love reading book reviews?  Review one!  Do you like bloggers who share deep thoughts on meaty subjects?  Figure out what you think about things yourself, and share.

And the Nominees Are:

Anyone who wants to do this tag.  I've been doing a ton of tags lately, and I don't want to wear out my welcome by tagging lots of people constantly.  If you're looking for something to post about, or you have blogging advice you want to share, consider yourself tagged!