Category: Blogging

On Being a Better Blogger & Reader

Posted August 31, 2020 in Blogging, Reading // 6 Comments

A couple weeks ago, Nicole @ Thoughts Stained With Ink shared a post on how she wants to be a better blogger. It’s a fantastic, honest, vulnerable post and I very much recommend popping over to her page and reading it. It also got me thinking. There’s a lot of things I want to do with my blog and content and with my life to be a better person. While this is a pretty wide spectrum, there are a few things I know I can zero in on immediately and try to fix… but also? I don’t think I’ve ever hosted […]

The Short & Sweet Life of a Blogger

Posted August 24, 2020 in Blogging // 16 Comments

I’ve been thinking a lot about leaving the book community. I understand on surface level how absurd of a comment this is. Leave the book community? I’m barely in it! I’m rubbish at blog hopping and only tiptoe around Twitter. I’m only in one Discord server that rarely has activity and even interactions on my “active” fronts – the blog and bookstagram – are middling at best. It’s more… the content creation aspect. I have a lot of ideas of things to write about, but I’m not sure the interest is out there. There are some other aspects as well. […]

“Why Haven’t You Finished Your Novel?” & Other Exasperating Productivity Suggestions During Shelter-In-Place

Posted April 13, 2020 in Blogging, Bookish Things, Reading, Writing // 8 Comments

In the early days of shelter-in-place mandates, a message sputtered up through the waves of social media: “Now that we’re all at home, we can Do That Thing!” For some people, “that thing” was learning a new instrument. Really digging into learning Portuguese. For many, it was perfecting sourdough bread (which I tease about, but I love sourdough bread… please keep baking!). In writerly circles, the pressure seemed to be on writing: you don’t have social engagements, so now you can finish that book. Doesn’t matter if the person was an aspiring novelist or a seasoned author – the vision […]

Paying My Blog Fees in ARCs – Did It Work?

Posted February 7, 2020 in Blogging // 6 Comments

At the beginning of 2019, I decided I wanted to experiment with an idea bouncing around in my head. I’m a self-hosted blog, and not a big one, but I made this choice because I liked the freedom it allows in customization and plugins. The Ultimate Book Blogger Plugin (and, subsequently, its sister plugin Book Database) have made that decision really worth it for me… but I am a hobbyist blogger. What does that mean? It means everything I pay in hosting and design comes out of my pocket. In my case, it means I have no affiliations, I’m not […]

A New Decade, A New Design (& Mad Props to Kat @ Novels and Waffles!)

Posted January 26, 2020 in Blogging // 16 Comments

I don’t know how many of you knew this, but my oldest post on The Literary Phoenix is from 2009. Yes, lovelies, that’s from 11 years ago! This blog has been around a long time, but my commitment to it has been flighty at best. Flighty, until the second half of 2017, when I dove myself into this old hobby blog and decided this was going to be My Thing. In the last decade, a lot of things have changed about this blog: It went from a writing blog (with some reading) to a reading blog (with some writing). The […]