Book Blogger Month: Guest Post by Raimy!

Hi, I’m Raimy, I’ve been blogging over at Readaraptor for just over a year… you’ll find some dinosaurs in amongst the books, hope you don’t mind! I love all things YA and a few things adult. My favourite authors are Malorie Blackman, Irvine Welsh, Nick Hornby and Sara Manning. I also love music so don’t be surprised to find one or two posts about that on my blog too!

I'm going to be completely honest with you guys and share my reasoning behind starting my blog. I didn’t start my blog to talk about books, though that was obviously one of the reasons. I didn’t start my blog to get books from publishers, though it’s been argued that a lot of us bloggers do (pish posh I say to that). No I started my blog to get my confidence up, and now that I’ve been blogging for over a year I am so glad I did!

Before I started blogging I had just finished uni. I moved in with my boyfriend and could feel myself retreating into my flat, only going out when my mates dragged me out for drinks and shopping. Most of my mates were still at uni having a good time and I had started a nine to five job, I was feeling like if I didn’t start doing something other than sitting around watching the telly I’d become boring, and I could think of nothing worse.

The thought of blogging terrified me; posting stuff for everyone to see and judge me for. I’m not a shy person when you get to know me and I certainly don’t come across as shy but I’m always worrying about what people think and what people will say about me. So I wanted to see if a blog would bring me out of my shell, get me to meet new people and get more friends (obviously I love my friends but they definitely don’t share my love of reading… not many of them anyway!)

When I started blogging it was nerve-wracking. I wasn’t sure that anyone would read the blog, or like it! Then after about 5 months blogging I was invited to my first “blogger event” it was set up by a fellow blogger not a publisher and it was near my home town so I thought, why not?! I got there, really scared about it all and as soon as we all met up, there were only 5 of us so not too daunting, it was amazing, I felt so at ease and didn’t even freak out that one of the group was a published author!

I realised that I fitted in with this awesome array of people from 22 to 40, just because we all had books and blogging in common. This is something that over the past year has really helped me. I think it’s brought me out my shell and helped me make friends all over the world. I was emailing someone in California the other day, and I went to London alone for an event at the beginning of March, if you’d have told me that I’d be doing that 18 months ago I would have laughed at you!

I really enjoy blogging and I really love sharing my thoughts on books that I read but I can’t argue with the fact that the biggest thing about blogging for me is helping my confidence grow and helping me meeting new people. It’s something that I love and I wouldn’t work as hard as I do if it wasn’t for that!

After all my waffling I would like to just thank Beverley for inviting me over to chat about blogging. I don’t actively jump out and say hello to many people, I just start chatting through others usually but please feel free to follow my blog and my twitter and if you say hi I will always reply!

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Thanks to Raimy for writing such a wonderful guest post, it was really interesting to read about her experiences with blogging and I hope you enjoyed it too!  Now hop over and check out her lovely, 'rawr-some' blog, I'm sure you'll love it :)

Here are the places where you will find Raimy:  Blog | Twitter