Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Blogging Confessions

Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish

This week’s Top Ten is “Top Ten Blogging Confessions”

I’m shy in pretty much all aspects of blogging.  I’m always afraid to contact other bloggers, to request ARCs, or to join conversations.  It’s something that I’ve been trying to work on, but I chicken out all the time.  I’ve gotten better at commenting on other blogs though.  I really should branch out and contact some of my favorite bloggers, at least to just tell them how much I like their blogs.  My social awkwardness is even worse online, and I don’t know how that’s even possible.

I have a Twitter, and I’ve used Twitter, but I just haven’t gotten the hang of using it the way that a lot of book bloggers do.  Some of that is due to my overwhelming shyness, but some of it is just because I’m not sure about the best way to take advantage of the site would be.

Although I have in the past, I’m certainly not as caught up as I’d like to be about scheduling reviews.  Scheduled reviews helps keep my stress level down during the school year, so I probably should work on that this summer.  Haha

As much as I wish that I did, I don’t know any one at any Publishing Houses, so I’m not one of the bloggers getting ARCs mailed to me on a regular basis.  My shyness certainly contributes to this, so I’ll be working more on reaching out to people.

Somehow I always make time to stop by my favorite hangouts, but I don’t always put in the daily time to have a Daily Post.  Sometimes I feel like if I did post everyday my posts wouldn’t be as thoughtful or as long, so I’m not sure if it really matters.

As you might have noticed, I have gotten ridden of my rating system on my blog.  I felt like the star system (or in my case “pencil”) was limited my reviews.  While I do enjoy Cee’s (The Novel Hermit) ABC rating system and PolandBananasBooks‘ Percentage Rating, I feel like for my own personal blog no rating system is better.  I like reading whole reviews because different people like different things in books, and that can skew star rating systems dramatically.  (For example, while I was largely not a fan of Panic by Lauren Oliver, and would have rate it a 1-2 star, others in the blogesphere loved it and their ratings were 4-5 stars).

I think that the title of this one pretty much sums it up.  I would love to make the switch, since I have heard wonderful things about it.  However, I’m afraid of losing followers and learning a whole new system, that I may end up not liking, and then what would I do?  I really should work that.

Weekly memes, like this “Top Ten Tuesday” or “Waiting on Wednesday” are hard for me to keep up with.  I’m not always available on those days, and even though the list is revealed pretty far in advance I never get around to pre-writing the posts.

My own original memes are hard to keep up with too, because my ideas for them are sporadic.  That’s another thing that I suppose I’ll try to work on.

Goodreads is a wonderful resource, but then allowed me to add anything that even look remotely appealing to my TBR list.  I ended up making a “real” TBR least to separate the books that I really want to read.

I also have a problem with buying books.  And my ratio of books I own that I have read to books that I haven’t read is concerning.  These last few months I made a vow to only read books that I owned, and that worked until I moved and got excited about my new library cards.

I mean, sometimes I do, but I’m the sort of reader who is reading seven books at once.  Often times books aren’t going to be finished for months, and I don’t review every book that I read.  I’m debating with myself over whether the “currently reading” is misleading for reviews that will never be written, but I’ll probably keep it around.

Wow, I just spilled my blogging guts all over this post.  I hope you enjoy all of my embarrassing blogging confessions and if you have any advice on how to get over some of my blogger fears let me know!