Blog All About It | Beginning

This year, one of the Challenges I signed up for is Blog All About It, hosted by The Herd Presents. The guideline is basically a blogging prompt challenge. Each month there’s a different prompt that you can interpret as you’d like then create a blog post around it. The 2018 list of prompts can be seen here on my Challenge Page. I will be posting for this Challenge on the 2nd Saturday of each month.

This was a tough one, but then I thought, that I would write about the beginning of my blogging adventure.

In 2008/2009 I was not able to do much physically due to severe back pain. At that time I already had a history of 3 back surgeries, and due to the pain, I knew that the inevitable of another was in my future. Reading, TV and playing games on the computer filled my days.

Knowing the boredom was getting to me, with a bit of depression setting in, at the time, my younger son was dating his future wife. He told me how her mom did online sweepstakes and had won so many things including trips and that maybe I should check it out. Great! Something new for me to do.

I entered many contests and won quite a few things, never a trip, however. Being an avid reader, I was drawn to contests for books. As I clicked on one, it brought me to a blog. A blog? What’s that? So while there, I checked it out and realized that there was a huge online book community. Then I would start clicking links to other blogs in this group. This looked like fun and something I would enjoy. But where would I begin?

At the time, I told myself that I would create a blog just as a way to keep track of the books I read with a few notes on the specific titles. But I continued to stalk the book blogs, in a good way. I was very lucky that I met Vicki from I’d Rather Be At The Beach who took me under her wing, mentored me and answered all my questions and my personal blog was introduced to the group. I then started receiving emails from authors and publishers to ask if I would read and review their book(s).

In 2011, after encouragement from a publisher and an author, I began organizing virtual book tours and now have 2 companies.

Nine years later, I am still part of the community and still enjoying it as much as I did when I first clicked on the link for the blog that started it all.