{Full Information on Original Participation Post}

Week One: Question One:

Beginnings: How do you prepare for a challenge like long-term reading goals or a good blogging challenge?

A most excellent question to ask a girl whose a self-declared Reading Challenge Addict! As in all sincerity, I tend to fly by the seat of my pants whilst stumbling across wicked sweet bookish events in the book blogosphere like its going to suddenly evaporate OR go plumb out of fashion! I have a curious eye and a heart which typically tends to leap out of itself whenever I come across a ‘new’ book or new ‘author’ who whets my fancy! I get all giddy inside from the immense joy of discovering ‘something’ that lights me up inside with such a positively charged glow that I very nearly become luminescent! I get the same itching of joy whilst deciding to curate a long-term reading goal &/or sorting out which blogosphere reading &/or posting challenge I want to tackle next!

The joy for me not only lies in the challenge that I undertake, but in the sweet beauty of interacting with other bookish souls who are as happy-hearted as I am about the world of books! Before I joined the blogosphere as a blogger, I was a regular reader who commented heartily on all the lovely blogs she came across who spoke to her in some way! I loved showing my appreciation for the writers of the blog(s), as much as the published authors who are curating the group author blogs I came across who stitch pieces of their personal lives into their blog lives. Giving all of us a glimpse into the heart of the ‘person’ behind the book of which we as readers will come to place in our hands. I am beyond grateful that I had this apprenticeship in the book blogosphere as an outsider, whereupon I was reading & absorbing information as quickly as my eyes could devour the text!

I started to pick up on little things like “reading challenges”, “read-a-thons”, “blog posting challenges”, as much as the entire inertia of how the pulse of the book blogosphere functions. I noticed blog badges were crafted to speak about their owner’s reading personality as much as the badges book bloggers liked to collect in their sidebars. As each blog I came across had its own distinctive edge and quirk of style, the sidebars equally reflected this in the selection of participation badges which promoted various events in the blogosphere at large!

What I appreciated in seeing the most was the sense of community which was ever present, as each book blogger I would come across was striving towards connecting to another who either shared the same bookish interests OR perhaps shared a common thread of excitement for the book community overall. Sometimes the joy of meeting unexpected friends transcended the blogosphere and entered into the domain of real life. I always smiled wondering that if I would dare to join (at some later date), would that lovely experience happen to me!? I can attest now, that yes, it has happened to me, and I am forever grateful for the friends of whom I might not have met if I hadn’t started to blog myself! These lovely bookish souls know who they are and are hopefully smiling as they read these words of praise on their behalf!

To this end, I always knew that as soon as I would start to ‘take-on’ a reading challenge, I must likely would not be a planner OR a girl who would know every inch of the challenge hours as they ticked off the clock. I was raised in such a lively and light-hearted spontaneous family, that any other method would appear to be a bit ‘odd’ to me! I approach challenges in the same methodology as I approach my writing life: when the muse strikes my fancy, I pounce on it! When I have a clarity of thought towards wanting to join a new challenge, I weigh my ability to give the time needed to complete the challenge & the ability to appropriate the materials needed to do it justice.

In this last regard, I must confess, I am not always the strong finisher as I am the strong beginner! Behind the blog there have been circumstances which took such a stronghold into my everyday life, to where I was unable to complete most of the reading challenges I had originally set my mind to achieve! However, being a diehard optimist, I truly believe that any ‘challenge’ one undertakes can always be completed even if the time of which the challenge was meant to be completed grows a bit more distant from the starting gate! Its not that I purposely set out to disappoint fellow participants and/or the lovely hosts I have come to know during these occasions of joy (as how else can you view a challenge that celebrates a branch of literature?),… but life can intervene and I am not immune to its effects.

I want to take a moment to highlight the lovely reading challenges which have entered my life since I launched my blog in August of 2013:

• Bout of Books: 8.0: 7 short days of intense reading joy! You pick the speed of how quickly you want to read &/or how many mini-challenges you want to participate in alongside your reading choices! There were also Twitter Parties to attend which I was a bit miffed I couldn’t partake in but back then (in August! laughs!) I was quite on the fence about joining Twitter, and simply withdrew from those events in order to strive to participate in as many sub-challenges as I could and amassed quite a hearty blog list to follow as well! I believe the final total was for 108! Bout’er blogs! I selected over 10+ books to attempt to read which were speaking to me from my shelves, aching for me to pick them up and give them some love! I completed only one book: Haunted by Heather Graham, which is book one of the Ghost Harrison series!  A series I originally discovered when I read Ghost Walk! OF the remaining books, most of what I accomplished was a ‘tasting’ of what was inside them rather than completing them overall. I have this museful wink of a idea of joining Bout of Books, 9.0 to continue from whence I left off! Ooh, how daringly sinful of me, eh!? Sinful as I was wrecked by falling ill and suffered a bit of a migraine during the last Bout! Ergo, the Bout became a proper “Bout!” to overcome! Needless, I endured so many happy moments that I am all but too eager to re-attempt to achieve them once more! With one cheekily added bonus: TWITTER PARTIES! Its like my new cheshire cat happy thing to do!
• Austen in August: 30 Days of celebrating the life of Jane Austen & the ‘after canons’ which came along after her original stories were published! Also viable for this reading challenge is to seek out biographies and non-fiction titles which are inter-related to Ms. Austen herself! The prospect of where your reading life could take you is quite literally limitless except to your imagination and scope of depth to research Jane Austen! Despite the fact the hours slipped through the hourglass faster than I would have preferred, I did achieve the pleasure of reading my most beloved Jane Austen novel “Pride and Prejudice”, which coincidentally happens to also be my first and only Jane Austen novel I have thus far read!

{NOTE: I began the BA Posting Challenge on 18 November, 2013; I resumed the challenge on 16 March, 2014!}

{SOURCE: Bookish Ardour provided the badge for all participants to use for solidarity!}

Copyright © Jorie Loves A Story, 2013.

Comments via Twitter:

No one was more surprised than I was to realise this post was never released back in [2013] when in theory it was ready to post!? I can’t even imagine how that happened! I released it tonight [20th September, 2018] whilst releasing the main post with an update for which this was attached. Coming during #blogtober 2018 I will be resuming a lot of the topics Bonnie pitched for this challenge whilst embracing new topics Jenn has created as well. Thereby, resurrecting a posting challenge which has one step in the past during my 1st Year as a Book Blogger whilst embracing where I am presently as a 5th Year Book Blogger!

#PostingChallenge Beginnings: How do you prepare for a challenge? https://t.co/N5JROhIElz via @Bonnie_Sparks (BookishArdour) Q1of26 Join me? https://t.co/jg98GVm3JV

— Jorie Story 📖🎧 (@joriestory) September 21, 2018