Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, and this week was “Top Ten Blogging Confessions”. I’m not sure if I’ve been blogging enough to have ten thing to confess, but I’ll do my best. Here we go:
1) I hate assigning ratings to books. This is purely a personal thing, I don’t dislike when others use a number scale or star rating, I just know I wouldn’t be able to rate books consistently this way. Sometimes I like a book even though I know it’s not all that well written, and I just wouldn’t be able to rate it highly knowing I’d given worse ratings to better written books. That’s why I only say if I would recommend reading a book or not and do my best to explain why.
2) I can only blog at night. This goes for writing in general, actually. For most of my life I’ve been a night owl, and even back in high school most of my homework got done between 10 at night and 1 in the morning. That’s why this Top Ten Tuesday post is going up early Wednesday. Daytime is for sleeping, right?
3) I hate travel blogging, even though this blog started out as a travel blog. I had pretty high hopes initially, but it just wound up being such a pain to format the posts and summarize what I’d seen and done into something easily digestible. I was pretty bad at it. That doesn’t mean I don’t love traveling, though, I’ll take any chance I get to go on an adventure.
4) I talk myself out of liking books while writing reviews. Seriously, I’ll finish a book, think it was pretty good, then halfway through writing about it I’ll realize that, no, it was actually awful. Maybe this is because I don’t always reflect on what I’m reading until the story’s over, maybe it’s just because complaining is fun (don’t act like it’s not). Either way, I feel like the reviews I’ve posted so far lean towards the negative, and I’m hoping to break that trend soon.
5) The phrase “guilty pleasure” annoys me. If you like something, you shouldn’t let anyone make you feel ashamed of it. I also dislike the idea that liking one type of music, movies, or whatever means you can’t like another genre as well. You can be into punk rock and classical. You can love Gilmore Girls and Breaking Bad. It doesn’t matter, let your freak flag fly.
6) It takes me forever to write a blog post. I’m talking over an hour a post, even for lists like this. Each word and line gets a lot of thought put into it, and I have a lot of bizarre hangups when it comes to writing that need attending to. For instance, the fact that the previous two sentences both have one comma bothers me, since I feel that the sentence structure within a paragraph needs to varied, and those two right next to each other are too similar. There also need to be at least two or three sentences starting with different words before I can start a sentence with the same word as another one. It would be ok to start this sentence with “it”, for instance, because there’s enough space between this and the previous sentence starting with “it”. I’m going to stop talking about this now before I descend completely into madness.
7) I love writing about my breakdown, which is funny, because I hate talking about it. At least once a year I revisit this horrible event from my past and try to shed new light on it, usually around December when it happened. It’s like a demented anniversary I just can’t help but celebrate. Part of me feels like there’s still something I can learn from how it happened, something I can use to prevent it from ever happening again. So look forward to that.
8) To go along with my slow writing, i read pretty slow as well. This is partially due to being dyslexic, but also simply because I don’t like to rush through books. Sometimes I try, especially if I feel like it’s been a while since the last review, but I find it only serves to make the book less enjoyable. I like to take my time and savor the story.
9) I don’t proofread my posts. It takes so long just to write them that I publish them as soon as their done to get it over with. If I started proofreading them, they’d probably just suffer in a limbo of nitpicking until the end of time. My perfectionism is oddly selective like that.
So there you have it, nearly ten blogging confessions. Well, more like eight confessions and one mini rant about “guilty pleasures”, but that’s really been bugging my lately so I wanted to mention it. My next post will be later this week, and most likely about my 4th of July trip since reading has been rather slow lately. Even for me.
heather arleney 
I do #4 at times as well. As I write my review, I start to discuss my annoyances with the story and soon my annoyances will start to overwhelm the review even if I thought I liked the book.
I don’t really like ratings either. They’re pretty ambiguous in my opinion, and occasionally arbitrary. I use the rating system on Goodreads but not on my blog. And usually my star rating reflects my personal sentiments about the book, not whether it’s “objectively” good, which isn’t necessarily fair. So, I might dock stars if I personally find a character irritating, even though that doesn’t necessarily make the book “bad” pr mean other people wouldn’t like it.
Not gonna lie, judging and complaining are definite perks to this whole blogging concept. I get where you’re going with how easy it can be to talk yourself out of liking a book simply by analyzing it. That’s definitely interesting to think about though. The fact that there are things that simply don’t stick out in terms of annoyance during the reading experience but can become issues afterwards when critiquing. Perplexing stuff!
Cheers,
joey via. thoughts and afterthoughts