The Zen Leaf

Well, it’s the last day of this lovely celebration, and today we discuss the dreaded burnout: One of the unfortunate side effects of reading and blogging like rockstars seems to be a tendency toward burnout. How do you keep things fresh on your blog and in your reading?

I’ll be the first to admit it – I didn’t handle burnout very well when it hit me. When I started blogging eight years ago, my reading posting pace increased exponentially. By 2010, I was reading and reviewing over 200 books per year. A few months into 2011, I slammed into a wall. What followed was a messy and chaotic untying of threads, jostling through non-book topics and shuffling through blog after blog after blog. Only after I disconnected completely for nearly a year was I able to find balance.

I never want to experience that kind of burnout again. For me, avoiding it involves a couple things.

On the book side, I read what I want, when I want. Sometimes, that’s ten books in two weeks. Sometimes, I don’t read a word for a whole month. Sometimes I read the same book six times in a row. If I can read however my brain desires, the reading tends to stay fresh, which helps me to feel fresh, and the blogging to feel fresh.

On the blog side, the most important thing for me was to quit caring about stats. When I worried about page views and comments, I felt compelled to come up with content and write more often, thereby pushing myself to read more and stick to detailed schedules. However, when I disconnected completely and posted my reviews in a completely private location with no stats to see, I was much happier. Now, I can post generally on a schedule, but not so rigidly that I feel trapped by it, and I’m not compelled to read or post at any particular pace.

This balance has helped both books and blogging to stay fresh for me, and honestly, I think that counts most when it comes to avoiding burnout!

For Day 4 of Book Blogger Appreciation Week, we discuss my favorite part of book blogging – community! Our prompt: How do you stay connected to the community? Examples: social media, regular commenting, participation in blog events, etc. Tell us your faves!

For me, blogging began and continues to be about friendship. I started blogging when I was a stay at home mom of three small boys with little adult interaction. Social media was how I survived that time, and discovering that there was a whole world of online bookworms just blew me away. I started without worrying about stats or page views or posting schedules, all those details that tend to consume, and instead focused solely on community interaction. I had long conversations with fellow bloggers in their comment sections and my own comment sections. I participated in events, got involved in reading challenges, went to conferences, became active on Twitter, accepted books for review, and advocated for various causes.

Most of that enthusiasm died away when I hit my burnout wall (discussed in tomorrow’s post). I dropped mostly out of sight for a few years, wishing to be invisible to everyone except the handful of good blogging friends I’d made over the years. These days, I still consider myself to be on the fringes of the book blogging community. I don’t know a lot of the newer blogs. I haven’t taken a book for review in years. I rarely participate in events, with a few notable exceptions, and I don’t really go out looking for new blogs and bloggers.

Part of this, of course, is that my life has changed drastically. My boys are teenagers now, so I’m not quite tied at home full-time, and I strive for a lot more balance between my interests now than I did back in the early days of blogging. Part of it is that I’ve made many good friends, and keeping up with those friends is more important to me than widening the circle. Plus, I simply don’t have the time that I had back then! I can’t comment on fifty blog posts a day anymore, and that was the main way I kept my toes in the proverbial pond.

(just a few blogger meetups from my blogging years)

Still, though I don’t feel like I’m really in the thick of the book blogging community as a whole, I enjoy my personal little blogger community, with all my lovely friends around me, on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and GoodReads, every bit as “real” as my “in real life” friends. The best part of this community for me over the years have been as each of these online friends become in-person friends as well. These meetups bring me great joy, and I hope to have many more of them in the future!

Day 3 of Book Blogger Appreciation Week asks: What have you read and loved because of a fellow blogger?

After eight years of blogging, there are literally hundreds of books I’ve read due to blogger influence. Picking a single book is hard, but I’m going to go with The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. This book was hyped like crazy in 2011, and I tend to avoid books that receive so much attention. So many people told me how good this one was, however, and the book became more than just a great read for me when I gave in.

See, I’d given up writing ten months before, due to circumstances too long to explain here. Writing had been a lifelong passion, and I’d dropped it, determined to never go back. The Night Circus changed my mind and reignited my love for creation, and that has meant far more to me than I can adequately express. So, once again, thank you bloggers for all that you’ve given!

ETA: Being the numbers geek that I am, I just went back over my eight years of blogging and counted up the books I read based on specific blogger recommendations. The total comes to 46% of my reading over the last eight years. That doesn’t even include all the books I never would have thought of on my own without blogger influence! In other words, y’all are awesome!

Welcome to Day 2 of Book Blogger Appreciation Week! Today, I’m interviewing Annabel from Annabel’s House of Books. Annabel’s blog is new-to-me, so I’m going to let her do most of the talking here:

1. Tell us a little about yourself and one thing that makes you unique.
I know I’m not the only scientist that writes a book blog, but I don’t know many of us. (Materials Science by the way – a mix of chem/phys/eng applied to the properties of stuff). I’ve been a voracious reader since childhood, and could have gone the arts route, but my pragmatic and curious scientific side won out career wise. I worked for a chemical giant for years, but now work in a school as lab technician, supporting science lessons.

2. Tell us a little about your blog and one thing that makes it unique.
I hope my USP is variety – I think I read a wider variety of books than virtually anyone else I know – from Westerns to Biographies, spy thrillers to prize-winning literature. I will try reading virtually anything except schlocky romances.

3. What are you favorite things to see in books?
I’m a big fan of hardbacks, or posh paperbacks with French flaps.

4. What are some of your bookish pet peeves?
When you buy a second-hand book which is advertised as Very Good but doesn’t meet the condition guidelines. My biggest peeve is cracked spines on paperbacks and too often books are misdescribed and have cracked spines and not mentioned.

5. What’s your Harry Potter house?
When I last did the Pottermore test, I came out as Gryffindor, but they’ve changed it recently… I must have another go. [Amanda’s note: Later, Annabel informed me that the new Pottermore test put her in Ravenclaw!]

6. If you were to dress up as a fictional character, any fictional character, which would it be?
I’ve done Hermione Grainger for World Book Day at school before. I knitted a scarf in Gryffindor colours and have a black robe. More fun would be Bellatrix Lestrange with wild hair! [Amanda’s note: This is frickin’ awesome and I wish I had a picture!!!]

7. Have you ever gotten to meet up with fellow book bloggers? What would be your dream blogger meetup?
Apart from my own blog, I co-edit a quarterly literary mag called Shiny New Books – with three other book bloggers. The day we finally got together in person after Skyping was lovely – We had afternoon tea at the Wolsey (posh eatery in the West End). We’ve had a couple of larger book-blogger meet-ups before which went OK. I often meet a few blogging friends at publishers dos in London though.  It would be lovely to arrange a UK book-bloggers meet again.

8. What are some of your non-bookish interests?
Obviously my daughter comes first, then the cats. I love films, theatre and art – but don’t get to go out enough. I’m a bit of a quiz fiend – very competitive when I get the chance!

9. Name a book (or two) that you’d readily recommend.
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes – simply wonderful thought-provoking SF with a very human heart. The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey and The Girl with Glass Feet by Ali Shaw – both have fairy-tale aspects seamlessly wound into wonderful stories.

(Annabel’s five-star books!)

10. Name a blog (or two) that you’d readily recommend.
A Life in Books,  Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings, The Age of Uncertainty, Lonesome Reader, Elle Thinks

Thanks so much for talking with me, Annabel – and it’s wonderful to meet you!