Celebrating 1 Year of the Blog Blitz!

Next month will be the first anniversary of the Blog Blitz. The idea behind this wonderful blog hop came from DL Hammons, who wanted somewhere that bloggers can have their blogs showcased on a particular date, and everyone else involved can visit and leave encouraging comments and feedback.

Since its birth it has been used to highlight many bloggers that may have lost their way a little, and the rest of us have dropped by to offer support and, hopefully, help them back on the right path.

There is a signup list, which at the moment stands at 364 participants, and at some point everyone should be the focus of a Blog Blitz! You can recommend bloggers for a Blitz if you feel they need a boost, otherwise the choice is random. But how good would it be to have over 200+ commentors visit your blog one day?

One thing I know DL would love is to reach that magic 500 mark for participants, so what are you waiting for? Head on over to sign up, and wait for the blog blitz notifications to come rolling in. You never know, the next one might be you!

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I'm celebrating this anniversary as part of VikLit's Celebrate the Small Things blog hop, another great opportunity to share your good fortune for the week. Make sure you visit her too to sign up and see what's being celebrated!

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Expanding onto pastures new ...

I hadn’t realised it until now but I’ve had this blog going for just over a year.  I’ve been quite absorbed in other things lately and the first anniversary on 3^rd October completely passed me by.

So here I am saying a belated Happy 1^st Birthday to my lovely blog!  

 

 

I had one before this but I didn’t manage to keep it going for one reason or another.  It was along the same kind of lines as this one when it started out, but after a whole year of posting this one has evolved into something a bit different.

It was originally intended as a means of chronicling my first tentative steps into the world of writing, but I have found writing to be a tricky business to get into.  I don’t just mean that from a publishing point of view either.  I'm not far enough along yet to know anything about that side of it!   

The very act of coming up with stories and then sitting down to turn them into something readable is a lot harder than I thought it would be.  Needless to say I haven’t given up, but I don’t want to say too much about that now; I’m saving it for the next IWSG post.

I’m pleased that my blog covers all three aspects of my title: book reviews (although these have been lacking lately) for Reading, blog hops and short pieces for Writing, and I think my film challenge is qualifying in the Everything in Between section.

Doing the A-Z challenge back in April certainly helped to boost my blogging confidence and I’m looking forward to it again next year.  I’ll probably work more to a theme next time around.

The focus of my blog seems to have moved a little way away from the art of writing over the last few months, and this has prompted me to think about starting up a second blog to focus solely on writing.  I fully intend to keep this blog going, it’s a lot of fun to do and I still have my challenges to get through!

I think for the new one though, I want to try and keep a journal of my writing practices and have a regular spot to post short stories and at this stage I’m thinking of themes for each month to write stories about.  It’s still in the very early planning stages but I will keep you updated as to its progress.  Ideally I’d like a launch date of 1^st January, and now that I’ve made this semi-announcement about it I should have more impetus to get it moving.  Watch this space for more news!