Tiara Talk: F-U-N

Its a fairly late hour as I sit down to finally write this post. I swear I've been watching the blinking cursor for hours on end by now trying to figure out what I wanted to say to you guys. I hate that I didn't have a Tiara Talk up and ready to go for you last week and I was determined to not wait until the last minute to write this one up...but if I hadn't procrastinated than I wouldn't be me, right?

And therein lies my topic for this week. I guess it really all comes down to an idea that has been floating in and around in my head all day today, so much that I actually made a post on my personal Facebook about it. I said, and I quote:

"Sometimes you just have to stop being so afraid and let your real self shine through. People are either going to love you for what you are or hate you for what you aren't. That's on them, not you. I am what I am and I'm not going to keep making excuses for that. So either accept me for who I am or don't let the door hit you on the butt on your way out."

Blogging hasn't been easy for me lately. I fell into a trap that I think a lot of us eventually get tripped up by: getting too focused on the numbers and not enough on the fun.

It seems like everyone in the blogosphere is on hiatus, just posted that they are going on one or have hit a dreaded reading slump. Myself, I only just got out of a reading slump a few days ago and up until then had seriously been considering going on a brief hiatus from blogging as a whole.

I think the pitfall of blogging is you can easily get caught up in making it a number game; letting it become all about how many followers, pageviews, subscribers, etc you have on your blog and forget while you're doing it in the first place. The publishers make it easy to do this, after all if you want to review their precious galleys/ARCs you have to reach the right amount of people.

But I didn't go into this for the free books. I started blogging because I loved books and I had far too few people in my life to talk about them with, then I discovered this community and it was a real eye-opener. I started blogging so I could chat books with everyone, to have fun, to embrace my nerddom and to spaz with my fangirls.

Awhile back I had said something along the lines of Typing Tiara didn't really feel like ME, that basically I was trying to find myself so that I would stand out. I would have a voice all my own. And I want to focus on that. I want to have fun with blogging again and not worry about the numbers.

So I guess this is just a little reminder to myself. And its about time. I'm not going to let myself get caught up in the numbers, drama or anything else again. I'm just going to gush about a few of my favorite things: authors, books and the amazing characters within. And, you know, anything else a nerdilicious princess can come up with. Because Typing Tiara is me and I want it to represent me, I need to stop being so afraid of speaking my own opinion and letting my nerd shine through.

So, who else has run into these problems and how have you snapped out of it? How do you feel you're better representing yourself on your blog? And perhaps most importantly of all, how did you make blogging fun? :]