Earlier on in the year, I completely and utterly missed my blogoversary! :( Yep. Completely. It was the 15th February and due to work commitments, and life in general it slipped by despite me being so excited to celebrate a year in the Blogging community. Anyway, this is the post that I intended to write and post way back then... the reasons I love being a blogger!
When I first started I never imagined that I would of spoken to so many brilliant people. Bloggers like Jenny (Wondrous Reads), Darren (Bookzone For Boys), Iffath (LoveReadingX) and so so many more. We're tweeting, e-mailing and just generally chatting all the time and I love it. Regardless of what's going on we can talk books wherever and whenever and that is a good thing for me! There's nothing I love more than coming home from a stressful day of work, to click the Twitter app on my iPod and see what's gone on throughout the day, what books people got, to share anything majorly exciting that I got that cannot wait till it's In My Postbox time, and to talk about books we've all read.
And it's not just the bloggers either. The publicists and even publishers themselves are just as amazing. Nine at Orion. Rosi and the girls at Random House, The guys and gals of Walker and so on and so on. And a special mention for the lovely Sarah (Editor over at Puffin!). They're all great. Emails, tweets. It's just so... humbling I suppose to get to talk to all these people who I never dreamed I'd speak to one day. All one great big book loving family!
Now I know I've said this before, but I am not in it for the free books but getting to read such amazing books before they come out in some cases has been one of the highlights of my year of blogging. I've read some real corkers and have had to keep quiet about them for months on end, which has sometimes been a struggle.And books that I'd of never picked up before either. I'd heard of The Hunger Games, but the premise sickened me. And then the people at Scholastic sent me over a copy of the first 2 books and I fell in love. Now they're amoung my favourite books ever and I'd of NEVER picked them up. Never. And it's all thanks to blogging.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is, that I love being a blogger. Over the past 6 months I've not been as active as I had been previous thanks to work and I am really working to turn that around. I don't want to neglect my blog ever again. I love it, and I love what it's bought into my life. I'd like to thank each and every person who has made this first year so enjoyable. My fellow bloggers. Publicists. Publishers. And of course the people who read this blog! I never imagined that anyone would ever want to read some old tut that I'd taken time to write and it makes me feel all warm inside when I read comments saying that that review has caused someone to go and get the book, or that they felt that way too when reading it.
So thanks everybody and here's to a great second year. You best watch out for my second bloggoversary because it's going to be huge. Some real making up to do for missing this year!!
