You may have noticed that June was a pretty busy month here around the blog. At the beginning of the month I privately challenged myself to post every day, and I’m really proud to say that I did it! Obviously, posting every day isn’t my normal routine; I’m more of a three to five times a week sort of blogger because that has worked for me. But May was a sort of a slump — I didn’t read or blog as much as I normally do, and I felt like I needed a challenge to get me back on track.
I’m really happy to say that I think the challenge worked. I’m feel more inspired about the blog, and I think I picked up a few good practices I can incorporate when I shift back to blogging slightly less frequently.
Metadiscourse
Because of a little mailing fluke, I have two copies of a book I am super excited to read — PAGE ONE: Inside the New York Times from Public Affairs. The book is a collection of essays on the future of journalism, timed to coincide with a recently-released documentary about the newspaper. The essays range from pieces about The New York Times to stories on the changing landscape of journalism and finally to some thoughts on how citizens can think about the media.
Last Friday I attended the second-annual Book Blogger Convention at Javits, which was probably the highlight of my entire BEA experience. As a blogger, I can’t think of anything better than getting to spend the day talking blogging with a group of people that actually get why doing this is so important.
Because I’m a journalist, I took compulsive – but mildly unreadable – notes during the day that I’m going to attempt to summarize for everyone who wasn’t able to make it. This means that if I mis-wrote anything from the event, please let me know and I’ll make corrections.
I’m the kind of person that writes everything down. I have a ratty little notebook and a pen that comes with me everywhere. I carried it around BEA, and took a bunch of notes about things I just didn’t know before I got there. These notes helped me form some ideas about what I might do next year to make BEA even more fun for me.
I also finally managed to get the few photos I took online, so I want to share some of those with you since pictures — especially of something as huge as BEA — are worth just as much as any words I can come up with.
BEA is about a lot of things, but one of the nerdiest and most exciting parts is all of the books. I mean, it’s ridiculous to see how many books are out there and how many fun ones there are to read. Before coming to BEA, I didn’t really understand how getting and finding books at BEA worked, so I didn’t think I’d come home with many.
I was totally wrong! I got a lot of great books in a number of ways, so I decided to list them based on how they were acquired to give you a sense of how BEA works. I’m sorry there are no pictures — I packed up all the books and mailed them without actually photographing anything!
Hello to everyone from BEA! It’s about 8:00 on Wednesday morning and I’m sitting on the small terrace (well, smoking area) at our hostel before I heat over to Javits for the second full day of BEA. I’m blogging on a borrowed netbook and the Internet connection is slow, so apologies for any lack of pictures or links — you can view all the photos I’ve taken (not many) by heading over to my Flickr album for BEA.
Enough excuses, on to the recap!
Hello to everyone stopping by from BEA and the Book Blogger Convention! If all is going well, when this post goes up I’ll be on my way to the airport. I’m putting this up as a quick introduction of myself if we didn’t get to chat long when we met, and because I forgot to include a photo of me in my last BEA-related missive.
This is also a sticky post — for new content (hopefully from BEA) just scroll down to the next post. If you’re curious about my plans for BEA, check out this post or just send me a message on Twitter — @kimthedork.
I haven’t talked about it much yet, but next week I’ll be leaving my dorky lair in Wisconsin to head to New York City for Book Expo America, a three-day trade show and convention dedicated to books!
Last year I only went to BEA for a total of about two days – I’d just started my new job and didn’t have much vacation. But this year I’m going all out: seven full days in New York to go to BEA, the Book Blogger Convention, and (hopefully) a little bit of sight-seeing around the city.
Today is my third blogiversary, which means my blog has officially moved out of the Terrible Two’s and is fast growing into a toddler!
I did a sort of “state of the blog and my life” post at the beginning of the year, and not a whole lot has changed since then. After how crazy 2010 was with all the life-changing events, I’m glad to have had a relatively quiet start to this year. However, I do have some fun “blog by the numbers” stats to report.
It’s Bloggiesta time! I’m a day late getting this post up, but I had to work yesterday and then I had a soccer game and then I thought I was going to be too lame to participate in the chips and salsa and margaritas and didn’t write this post. But then I got really motivated, so I actually spend some time Bloggiesta-ing on Friday night, which was cool. Check out the face lift the header and blog got — nice, yes?
I should back up. The Bloggiesta is an event hosted by Natasha at Maw Books where the idea is to spend three days just working on your blog. It’s a time to mess around with projects you’ve been putting off, get caught up on things you’re behind in, or try to get ahead a little bit.
