FF Friday: In Which I Tell You Why I’m A Blogger

Feature & Follow is a weekly blog hop hosted by Parajunkee and Alison Can Read. This week, I’m going to tell you why I started blogging and the story behind Read All The Things! One of my New Year’s resolutions is to write more personal posts, so this is me attempting to do that.

Why I Blog

Remember that movie, Julie & Julia? Well, there’s a scene where Julie says, “I can write a blog. I have thoughts.” That’s pretty much what happened with me. I started reading blogs when I was a teenager, but I didn’t know about book review blogs. Maybe they weren’t as prevalent back then. I mostly read blogs about extreme lifestyles. You might not know this about me, but I’m interested in wilderness survival, living off the grid, and being self-sufficient. Teenage-me was a misanthrope who had elaborate fantasies of living in the remote wilderness and never seeing another human again. I liked reading about people who were living my dream.

Since I spent so much time reading blogs, I eventually got it in my head that I should start one. I didn’t have the courage to do it until I was around 19. Through my first few years of college, I was a blogger/co-blogger on three different blogs. Thankfully, none of them exist anymore. The first blog was a humor blog (it taught me that I’m not funny). The second was a blog that put fad diets to the test (it taught me that eating cabbage for every meal is a terrible idea). The third was a blog about the history and ethics of capital punishment (it taught me many creative ways to kill people, none of which I've ever used). I enjoyed writing posts and doing research for these blogs, but I wasn’t passionate about any of them. Actually, that’s a lie. The death penalty history blog was interesting in a nightmare-inducing way, but you’re probably not here to read about brutal, historical, government sanctioned murder.

Okay. Fast forward to 2012. I was taking time off between finishing my undergraduate degree and starting a post-BA program. During my time off school, I discovered travel and journal-style blogs. I had always wanted to be the type of person who keeps a journal. So, I set out to start a journal blog about my life. I chose Blogger over Wordpress because I already knew how to use Wordpress and wanted to learn Blogger. I used my name as the blog’s URL because that’s what other journal bloggers did. I didn’t give the blog a name because I couldn’t think of one. I didn’t plan on telling anyone except my family about my journal because I like my privacy (as you can probably tell by my teenage-wilderness-misanthrope phase).

At the end of 2013, I sat down to post on my brand-new blog-journal, and . . . I realized that I’m mind-blowingly boring. I had nothing to say about myself. I started blogging about books because I spent a lot of time reading. That’s how my journal blog accidently became a book blog.

I didn’t actually know that book blogs were a thing until I became more active on Goodreads in 2014. I wrote book reviews on Goodreads and discovered some amazing book bloggers through that site. In 2014, I was the not-so-proud owner of a neglected, nameless blog, so after approximately 3.5 nanoseconds of thought, I slapped Read All The Things! in the header and started posting book reviews. Ta-da! I was now an official book blogger.

Read All The Things! has lasted longer than any other blog I’ve worked on. I think this is because I’ve finally found something that I’m passionate about. I love to read, and I love the book blogging community. I don’t know many people in real life who get ridiculously excited about books. You guys make me feel like slightly less of a weirdo, and that’s why I blog.

The follow part of FF Friday: If you are a book blogger and you leave a link to your blog in the comments below, I will follow you on Bloglovin’. If you want to be friends on Goodreads, Twitter, BookLikes, or G+, that would be awesome, too. Click the links to go to my pages on those sites. I’m looking forward to “meeting” you.