Blogger Recognition Award.

First of all, this is the rather girly, pink and flowery feminine type logo that comes with the award, it’s cool for all you ladies out there but it’s making me shudder at its girlishness! So, I give to you the manly wolf logo for my blog. Wolves are cool! 

I’m quite lapse at blogger tags and awards and don’t always do them but I thought I’d give this one a go. I would like to thank the five fine bloggers who nominated me, Susan at Books From Dusk Till Dawn, Sonja at A Lover of Books, Emma at Emma’s Bookish Corner, Jessica at Jessica’s Reading Room and Nat at The Owl on the Bookshelf.

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Rules of the Award:

1. Thank the blogger who nominated you and provide a link to their blog.

2. Write a post to show your award.

3. Give a brief story of how your blog started.

4. Give two pieces of advice to new bloggers.

5. Select 15 other bloggers you want to give this award to.

6. Comment on each blog and let them know you have nominated them and provide a link to the post you created.

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How My Blog Started:

Well……hhmm……the story behind this blog, now…..OK, right, I’ve got it! Now let me regale you with the tale!

One day I was sitting on the porcelain throne, thinking, musing and contemplating life (as you do, it’s where all the great minds think and where Tywin Lannister died, talk about heritage). When I decided to turn my mind and my attention to world domination, you see, I like to think I’m ‘evil’ and ‘bad’ and truth be told I could easily picture myself as a malevolent tyrant ruling over the masses. The only question was how to go about achieving my dastardly goal.

Most of the ideas I could come up with had already been done, tried, tested and failed I might add by lacklustre nitwits and then it struck me, an idea so original and diabolical in its concept that it was bound to succeed!

This idea you ask, well, to create a book blog of course! What better way to take over the masses than with subliminal messages implanted within poetry and book reviews, key words and phrases repeated that would over time give me control and make you all read fantasy. Come on, we’re all friends here and you can admit that fantasy truly is the greatest genre of them all!

Now, with my evil plan finally coming to fruition, muahaha! As your tyrant ruler I give to you the key phrase that once read will open your minds to me and I demand that you all go out, buy a fantasy book and then send me £10! The phrase is: I am Da Fox, pimped in white, ready to fight, dream to be on Kyle, I ooze that chavvy style, I am Da Fox! (Kyle refers to Jeremy Kyle, a chavvy morning TV show in the UK, trust me, there’s a whole other story behind that phrase and Da Fox that is so unbelievable it must be true).

Nah, storytelling aside how I came up with the blog isn’t very exciting at all and probably makes me out to be rather sad, get out the world’s smallest violin and label me weirdo. Until the beginning of 2016 having a book blog wasn’t something that I’d ever really considered, I wouldn’t say that I’d scoff and deride the idea more that, I’d never thought about it.

I had won a couple of Goodreads Giveaways in December 2015, reviewed the books (I like to think I’ve got slightly better at reviewing since then) and I was lucky enough to get a book from Twitter to and at the back of my mind I started to consider that a book blog might be an idea, it would allow me to offer my thoughts on books and also allow me to be part of a community of book lovers (not knowing many readers myself).

But there was a lot of unanswered questions, I’m not the most confident person at times and I needed to think it through, would I suck at blogging? Would I enjoy it? Would I stick with it? Would anyone bother to follow my blog? Would people think my reviews were terrible? Lots of questions that I didn’t know the answer to and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to take the leap from book lover to book blogger.

Anyway, I went on just being a book lover and reading my books. Then sadly, my dog, Sully took ill (she’d be laying on the sofa next to me while I was reading most of the time) and things didn’t go well, after a couple of weeks it was found that she had terminal cancer, no hope and needed to be put down. She went to sleep for the last time on February 19th 2016.

It hit me hard, I’m not going to lie, act tough and macho and say it didn’t matter, it did and it fucking killed. I needed something to take my mind of things, the loss, unhappiness, dark thoughts and perhaps even boredom. Melodramatic maybe, but pets are more than animals and are part of the family, they give love unconditionally and are always there for you. Any animal lover will agree, a pet deserves to be mourned, to be remembered.

So, the idea of blogging resurfaced and I created a blog on blogspot, it only lasted a couple of days, I hated the interface, my heart wasn’t in it and I didn’t enjoy it. Suffice to say, it got deleted and cast into the vast cavernous abyss of failed blogs.

I decided to give it another go on a different blogging format and tried WordPress. To cut a long story short, on the 5th March 2016 The Tattooed Book Geek was born and it has somehow survived up until this very day!

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Offering my sage like elderly wisdom to the younglings / Two Pieces of Advice to New Bloggers:

1). Just Be Yourself! We all have different personalities, likes and dislikes and at the end of the day your blog should be an extension of who you are. I have tattoos and so I incorporated the fact I have them into my blogs name hence, The Tattooed Book Geek, it speaks of who I am rather than naming your blog Generic Book Blog. But I also try to add my own personality into my blog, I include jokes (often bad ones), the occasional popular culture reference into my posts and sarcasm, the gift of the gods I might add! I’m often sarcastic in my rare but oh so awesome discussion posts. I also dabble in poetry, I know, apologies to anyone who follows my blog that you have to put up with my simplistic rhyming poems but again, it’s part of who I am. 

There are lots of blogs out there, countless amounts and while we don’t all read the same books and like the same genre……..But we are all book lovers together and a lot of the time we follow blogs for the bloggers personality so let yours shine through, make your blog part of who you are. 🙂

2). Enjoy It! Reading is a hobby and blogging is to, we all started our blogs because of our love of books but it’s sometimes easy to forget that. People don’t realise that blogging takes time and isn’t always easy, you have your own blog to create and then manage, posts to draft and prepare, graphics to make and other blogs to like and comment on and it all adds up, takes time, add in your reading to and you can occasionally lose the enjoyment of it all when you get snowed under and bogged down with posts to read, books to read and reviews to write.

If you feel the enjoyment waning and it seems like blogging is becoming a chore then take a step back, there’s no shame, take a break and chill, it’s only a hobby. We all blog differently and while some people will post each day, more than once a day even, others only post once or twice a week, same for the selection of posts you choose to do, there’s nothing wrong with memes but we do like to see reviews to (it’s where the bloggers personality shines through) and the various other plethora of varying post types that are out there.

There are no set rules to blogging, no guidelines of do’s and don’ts for you to follow and abide by, simply post what you want, when you want and enjoy it, blogging is a hobby, have fun and do whatever makes you happy! 🙂 

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Bloggers to Nominate:

After the recent book blogger bashing that has been going on, you can find my post where I represented and stood up for us all here:

• An Open Letter To The Uninformed Masses and The Haters.

I’m not going to nominate anyone individually as to me you all deserve recognition, we are all real readers and for having a blog we all deserve some recognition. So take a bow my good people and consider yourselves nominated, I stood up for us all and now it is time for you all to be counted, have at it, stand up and represent!!!!

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Twitter, Goodreads, Blog Facebook, Personal Facebook.