I’m sure many of you can understand that. I’ve got a number of large, and long, projects on my To Do List. I think it’s probably too many, but I seem to actually have some kind of focus at the moment. This afternoon I managed to power my way through one project that I’ve been putting off for eight years.
In 2014 I ended up with a free ticket to attend a National Book Bloggers Forum hosted by Penguin Random House in Sydney. The entry ticket was free, but you had to be in the first fifty people to put yourself forward, and you had to foot the bill for any travel to Sydney and any hotel rooms for that night. It was only one day, and I was incredibly lucky to have family in Sydney who could put me up for a couple of nights. So, I flew up and stayed with my cousin, it was lovely to catch up for two whole nights.
After the NBBF all of us bloggers wanted a chance to keep in touch. We already had the Aussie Book Bloggers Facebook group. Those of us already in the group made sure everyone else joined us, and many of us connected on Twitter, I created a #NBBF14 list on Twitter. Whenever I look at that list I get a little thrill of memory.
Some time later we were discussing how good it would be to have a website for Australian Book Bloggers. Not for us to chat about blogging, but just a place for us to be listed, to make it easier for readers, authors or publishers to find us. Rather than start from scratch I spoke to a lady who helped put together the original Aussie Book Bloggers website. She was happy to let me take over the work and gave me access to the website. That was in April 2014. The website was in Blogger or Blogspot and I couldn’t make head nor tail of how to work it. I did manage to export the data to WordPress. At that time everyone rushed to sign up their blog. My thoughts back then were to do an audit of each and every listing to see if they fit into the criteria laid down by the people who created the original website. Today I finished that audit. I sent out a number of emails with questions, and now have to deal with the answers, I also received a number of returns because the email address is no longer valid.
I’m now incredibly sad. There are many book bloggers out there who only managed to blog for eighteen months to two years. So few of us are still going after ten plus years. I’ve been blogging since 2009 and there are a few who have been blogging for longer than me. I find it makes me sad when people don’t continue their blogs. I’m sure they have good reasons, but I’m still sad.
But why am I gasbagging about this instead of writing about a book? The simple reason is because I don’t have a book to write about. Last week I started a book about Alan Turing. It’s almost six hundred pages and is incredibly dense. Alan Turing was the poster boy for Pride Month last month, well deserved, too. He was a very bright man, understood a lot of science and maths, and this biography I’m reading details a lot of the things that interested him. I’ll write more about Turing and the book when I’ve finished it or decided that there’s far too much I don’t understand. I’m finding it really interesting, just a really slow read. To give you some idea of how slow, I’ve been reading for a little over a week and I’m not up to page 100 yet. I’ll probably read page 100 tonight, but seeing as sometimes I can only manage one paragraph I’m not going to hold my breath. What I’m saying is that you’re going to get book related words from me for at least a couple more weeks.