Three Tips for Getting Out of a Reading Slump

Everyone has reading slumps, periods of time where life catches up and you don't have time to read, or the motivation to pick up a book vanishes.
It's frustrating, particularly when you read on a regular basis and books are usually your outlet for escaping life.
I've been going through a reading slump recently (you may have been tipped off by the lack of posts going up on here!) where real life has reared its ugly head and I just haven't had the energy to pick up a book and escape for a while. So below I'm listing three tips for getting out of a reading slump.

1. Re-Visiting Old Favourites

Sometimes I look at my to read pile and no matter how much I want to read the books in there I cannot muster the motivation to pick up something there. Instead all I want to do is re-visit some of my favourite books: Harry Potter, The Scorpio Races, Julia Quinn, Deanna Raybourn. All favourite that I know inside and out and can provide a sense of comfort when I pick them up again. Sometimes spending some time with a book I know and love can be all the nudging I need to get me back in a reading frame of mind and back to my pile of books waiting to be read.

2. Focus on Something Else
When I'm not reading I love watching TV shows. I have a whole host of favourites that I love watching, and sometimes my brain needs a break from reading so I turn to TV. Sometimes taking a step back and doing something else, allowing my brain to recharge and stop thinking about books for a while is all I need to nudge me back again. Find the other things that you love to do when you're not reading and bring them to the fore for a while. Give your brain a break from books and soon enough you'll find yourself itching to get back to your to read pile.

3. Decide to take a step back

This particularly applies to book bloggers, because often the wanting to read is all tied up with the feeling like we need to blog. So when I'm struggling to read and review, instead of making myself feel guilty for not doing it I deliberately take a step back and decide to take a few days off. That lifting of pressure, even if it only lasts a few days is usually enough to get me wanting to read and review again and even if I've given myself a few weeks away I'm usually back and reading/reviewing in a couple of days.

There you have my top three tips, now I would love to hear from you guys! What do you do to get out of reading or blogging slumps? Do you have things that you do or try to avoid doing? Or any books you pick up to try and get you back in the reading mood? Let me know in the comments below.

Dealing with Plagiarism

Last week, just as I was attempting to head off to Poland for a friend’s wedding, I had a message from Steph at Cuddlebuggery book blog, alerting me that I’d been plagiarised.

Whilst I was insanely glad that’d she’d alerted me and was so incredibly supportive and awesome all the way through the last few days, what followed was a few days of hellishness when I was supposed to be happy and celebrating the marriage of two awesome people.

Let’s start at the beginning. By the time I picked up Steph’s message the plagiariser (Samantha) had already removed over forty plagiarised reviews from both her goodreads page and her blog, having stolen from over fifteen other book bloggers that we know of, and potentially many more. Now if you visited either you were greeted by a ghost town of dead links and empty pages. Luckily Steph had screen grabbed as many of the plagiarised reviews as possible and was able to send me mine. 

Note to self: Don’t read reviews someone has stolen from you on a train travelling across Poland, you will either a) look like you might murder the person opposite, b) cry or c) both.

Perhaps it’s just as well I opened it then because my wifi was so patchy that it meant I couldn’t do any of the knee jerk reactions that I probably would have done had I been at home. I had time to think and stew and generally fume until I was in bed in the hotel that night after sixteen hours of travel and unable to sleep.

Working my little fingers like crazy across a phone keyboard that was definitely not built for long email writing, I fired off an email to Goodreads alerting them and adding my voice to the cacophony of bloggers who had been hit.
I talked to friends and other bloggers, and then I (foolishly) went on Samantha’s new twitter page. After she’d been found out she’d shut down her old twitter page and started a new one, where she had in the last few hours been talking to author Kate Scelsa about how much she was enjoying reading ‘Fans of the Impossible Life.’ At that point my rage kinda overflowed, because I was in the middle of reading ‘Fans’ too, and Samantha’s last tweet re-sparked all the outrage I had felt on the train.
I replied.

Since I was then on a roll, I drafted an email to send to Samantha. By the time I was finished, but hadn’t yet sent, I had an email from Samantha in my inbox.

At the time I felt gratified she had finally bothered to apologise and I sent a surprisingly nice response back. Since then it has emerged she sent the same email to anyone she discovered she had plagiarised from, she also lied repeatedly in follow up emails she sent to me, and openly admitted she didn’t know who she had plagiarised from. That’s how many people she’s stolen from, she genuinely can’t remember it anymore.

The reviews were down, she’d apologised and promised never to do it again and I was feeling slightly calmer about the whole thing. I thought that things were on their way to being resolved.

I went to the wedding, I partied.

I came home to another message from Steph – Samantha was putting the plagiarised reviews back up again with odd words tweaked and other bits of my review plagiarised instead.

Shortly after she set her goodreads profile to private so only friends of hers would be able to see the reviews she was putting up.

Around twelve hours after that Steph posted an expose on Cuddlebuggery detailing everything that had happened.

Twelve hours later Goodreads removed Samantha as a user.

So why am I telling you all this? Two reasons.
Firstly because I have never had my work plagiarised before and when Steph first told me what had happened I had no idea what to do. Did I just stay quiet and seethe? Did I make a fuss? Did I need to contact anyone? Without Steph’s help I would probably have done nothing, as it was she guided me through all the various things I could do to try and rectify the situation. Who needed to be contacted, what needed to be handled. She was amazing, and I cannot thank her enough.

And I know that other bloggers would be equally stumped if put in this situation, so this is in part to make people aware of steps you can take if you find your work has been plagiarised.
Contact the plagiariser, try to get it take down. Contact goodreads and alert them. Don’t keep quiet about this sort of thing. Plagiarism is not ok and should not be glossed over. Samantha is most likely having a bad time of it at the moment with so many book bloggers outraged at what’s happened, and I do feel sorry for her, but I also feel she really didn’t help herself with how she handled it. So at the end of the day, other bloggers needed to be made aware of the situation and to keep an eye out for more plagiarism more than her feelings needed to be protected.

And secondly, because I needed to talk about it. Like I said, this is the first time something like this has happened to me, I have lived in a fairly drama free corner of the blogosphere, and I was shocked and angry and I felt violated.
These were my words, my hard work, being stolen and passed off as someone elses. Not only on her blog, but her facebook page, her tumblr, her goodreads page and (perhaps the most upsetting part for me) on Netgalley. These are books she cited she had received from Netgalley which meant that she was sending my reviews to publishers and saying they were her own.

I keep oscillating between being furiously angry and horribly depressed and upset about the whole thing. I have a stack of books I need to review and I cannot motivate myself to get on and write the reviews because there’s this terrible little voice in the back of my brain saying ‘what’s the point if someone is just going to steal them?’ Then there was the other little voice in my brain that was just laughing hysterically because why would she steal my ramblings?! Should I be flattered in some weird way? I think that's the part of my brain that has had too much caffeine.

My blog has been my project (my baby) for five years, I have invested thousands of hours perfecting the layout and design, building up my readership and contacts in the publishing world, reading the books and writing the reviews. And some girl has come along and reduced all of that to Ctrl C + Ctrl V – LOOK AT WHAT BEAUTIFUL WORDS I WROTE.
That is a horrific feeling.

So if you find out you have been plagiarised, know that there are others that know what horrible feelings you’re having, and do not stay quiet and let them get away with it. The blogging world is a place where we are able to express ourselves, share our love of books, make friends and bring out our creativity, and no one should be allowed to take that away because they didn’t much fancy writing a long review for themselves.

The Secret Life of a Book Blogger Tag

My Evil Overlord Cait at Paperfury tagged me to do this, The Secret Life of a Book Blogger tag, and me being nosy means that I love to know the secret lives of other book bloggers. But I suppose if I want to know about you guys, it's only fair that I answer the questions myself first... So here you have it, this is the very secret life of The Review Diaries Book Blogger.

1. HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN A BLOGGER?
I’ve been blogging for five long years now, which is crazy, because that also means it’s been five years since I graduated uni, which is OBVIOUSLY LIES.

2. AT WHAT POINT DO YOU THINK YOU’LL STOP BLOGGING?
Never. I’ll probably take breaks (I already had a long break due to real life problems intruding in) but I won’t ever stop blogging. I’ll have patches where I read and blog less, and months where I read an insane amount of books and won’t be able to stop talking about them, but I never want The Review Diaries to be a past tense thing.

3. WHAT IS THE BEST THING ABOUT BLOGGING?
So Many Things.
The community is awesome. I have made so many awesome friends through blogging. Some I’ve met and some it’s doubtful I will ever meet because they LIVE ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD, but they’re awesome and the community and friendships are truly the best thing about this whole shebang.

But it’s not just that. The sense of pride and achievement I feel when I look at my blog, at my stats, at my different social media platforms, is huge. I built this baby up from scratch when I had no idea what on earth I was doing and was just stumbling around trying to make a pretty header, to today, where I still have a very loose grasp on what I’m doing, but there’s also a lot that I DO know how to do now and I’ve taught myself. I can do basic html coding, which is a huge deal for me, and is only something I can do because I got bored of not being able to do what I wanted. So I worked it out. This site is my baby. I have worked so hard to build it into what it is today, and I will keep working at it as long as it’s going, constantly improving and aiming to make it the best I possibly can. On bad days it can be my reason for getting up in the morning, and it is a source of huge pride, and that is quite frankly, pretty damn awesome.

I’m not gonna lie, the books from publishers are pretty incredible too. When I’d been blogging for a few months I remember wistfully asking my Mum if I’d ever be the kind of blogger who get sent advanced books, and I remember the giddy excitement when I received my first one. I still get that giddy excitement every time I get a new book. It doesn’t matter how often or how many, I am grateful and excited and feel so privileged about every single one.

4. WHAT IS THE WORST THING? WHAT DO YOU DO TO MAKE IT OKAY?
The self doubt. Every blogger experiences self doubt. It is something that never goes away, but you get much better at dealing with it over time. I have always had and probably will always have days when I wonder what the point is, if it’s worth the effort, if what I do matters at all. But then I a) remind myself that actually, I’m doing this first and foremost for me and it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. And b) anyone telling me they bought a book because of something I said or because of my review, that feeling is incredible. That makes everything worth it, because it doesn’t matter how many people are reading this blog, if just one person has decided to pick up a book because of what I’ve said about it, I can go home happy.

Also chocolate, chocolate helps any situation.

5. HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE YOU TO CREATE/FIND PICTURES TO USE?
I’m very basic with the pictures I use in my reviews because I like to keep it simple and clean. I tend to have the cover picture, which I nab from Goodreads, and my stars for the rating, which are the same for every review.
However with my newfound love of Instagram I am starting to take more photos, so when possible, and when I actually have a physical copy of the book to photograph, I am starting to take more photos of the books. That used to take me a while to get the right shot, but I’m getting better at knowing what I need and how it should look so it doesn’t take me long at all now.

6. WHO IS YOUR BOOK CRUSH?
SO MANY BOOK CRUSHES. I can’t even.
Jamie Fraser from Outlander by Diana Gabaldon.
Jared Lynburn from The Lynburn Legacy by Sarah Rees Brennan.
Nicholas Brisbane from The Lady Julia Grey series by Deanna Raybourn.
George Cooper from The Song of the Lioness Quartet by Tamora Pierce
Sean Kendrick from The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater
Gansey from The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater
Brigan from Fire by Kristin Cashore
Alan Ryves from The Demon’s Trilogy by Sarah Rees Brennan
I could go on, but I figure eight is more than enough…

7. WHAT AUTHOR WOULD YOU LIKE TO HAVE ON YOUR BLOG?
I have been stupidly lucky in that two of my biggies have already been on my blog, both Deanna Raybourn and Sarah Rees Brennan have come on to be interviewed (I may have fainted from excitement on both counts.) which leaves only two other authors that would leave me potentially incoherent with excitement were they to grace my humble blog with their presences. Maggie Stiefvater and Tamora Pierce. The former because oh dear God her books are just the best and I cannot actually put into words how much I love them. They are the type of books that I physically want to put inside my rib cage so I am never parted from them. (Too much?)
And the latter because her books shaped the type of books I love to read today. The Song of the Lioness Quartet was fundamental in shaping my love of fantasy, my love of magic and my love of strong female characters.

8. WHAT DO YOU WEAR WHEN YOU WRITE YOUR BLOG POSTS?
My magical writing hat...
Well it depends on when I’m writing. Take for example now, at three in the morning, I am writing this in my pjs wearing a tshirt that says ‘clearly I have made some bad decisions’. Accurate.

9. HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE YOU TO PREPARE?
I’m going to take that as how long does it take me to write a post and get it ready to go. It can vary. Some books I know exactly how I felt and what I want to say and the review will be written and scheduled in twenty minutes from start to finish. Others I have the review document open on my laptop for a week. I’ll keep coming back to it, adding, re-wording and generally poking it until I’m happy with how it’s turned out. The actual posting and scheduling doesn’t take very long at all.

10. HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THE BOOK BLOGGER COMMUNITY?
See above, I love it. Book bloggers are so friendly and welcoming, and the best part? Everyone adores books so they’re automatically pretty awesome. I have made some really awesome friends through this community and had so many incredible experiences as a result. Sometime the drama can become a little overwhelming, and there are always frustrations, but really, you couldn’t ask for a more awesome collection of people.

11. WHAT DO YOU THINK ONE SHOULD DO TO GET A SUCCESSFUL BLOG?
There is no key or secret formula. It’s all about the person behind the blog and people connecting with them. The only advice I can give is to be yourself and write and do what makes you happy. Trying to imitate other peoples blogs and conform to the posts you think you should be posting is just going to make you miserable and that will show through to your readers. Write the posts you love to write, do things your way, your love and enthusiasm for what you’re doing is much more likely to attract readers than anything else. Blog for yourself above anyone else.

So there you have it, my ‘secret’s' to book blogging, nothing particularly ground breaking, but I’ve really loved taking part in the tag, so thank you Cait for tagging me. Now it’s over to you! I would love to hear about the secret lives of these wonderful book bloggers, although anyone who wants to join in is welcome! Link me to your tags in the comments below!

Angie @ Angieville // Rosie @ Rosie Reads // Zoey @ Uncreatively Zoey // Beth @ The Quiet People // Sophie @ So Many Books,So Little Time // Kerr & Rachel @ Paein and Ms4Tune // Mishma @ Chasing Faerytales // Viv @ Serendipity Reviews

How I Run my Book Blog

I've been contemplating doing a post about how I personally book blog, but hadn't really found the impetus to do it until I saw Sophie's brilliant post about Running a Blog over at her site 'So Many Books, So Little Time', so the fact that I actually finished this post and put it up is all on her - thank you for inadvertently giving me the push to do it Sophie!

Running a book blog is a lot of hard work. I'm really lucky that whilst I'm in France I don't have to go out to work, I do it all from home, so I can devote a lot more time to reading and reviewing than I could before - which definitely helps ease the stress!

1. As soon as a book comes in, either as a proof copy or an e-galley, I look at the release date and then at my diary. I don't post reviews earlier than two weeks before the release date, so that can mean a lot of shuffling around of previous ideas of when I'd post reviews. My diary is a messy and cluttered thing...

I have to have a physical diary to work with, otherwise my brain explodes. No really, brain matter all over the screen, so messy. For some reason my head just cannot work its way around having a calendar/diary on my phone or computer, as handy as that would be, so I have a little purple book giving me a month per page, with just enough space to write what post will be going up each day/scribble it out several times and make a mess.

That way I can immediately see where I have space, or where I need to make space and shift other reviews around to fit in the latest book. Unless I have an insanely busy week or month I tend to only blog on weekdays, because I mainly post reviews and trying to read enough books to fill seven days a week would cause me to binge eat an entire freezer of Ben & Jerry's and lie on my fainting couch.

2. Once I've worked out where there is space I create a scheduled post on Blogger with the title of the book and schedule it for the appointed day. That way I have a back up system of when things should be being posted and it helps me to stay on track.

It starts off as a scheduled post with a title and no labels. That way I can see it's still to be done. As soon as the review is in there and it's all ready to go I add the labels. Voila!

At a glance I can see where the gaps are and what I need to be reading and reviewing next.

When I finish the book I try to sit down no later than 48 hours after I've read the book, otherwise my goldfish brain has already moved onto the next book and I have trouble putting all my thoughts together. I used to make notes whilst I read, but now because I sit down straight after to review it I find I don't need to as much. Some reviews will sit open on my laptop for several days whilst I formulate what I want to say (weirdly it's sometimes the books I've enjoyed the most that I find the reviews hardest to write because it's hard to say anything other than READ IT READ IT NOW SO GOOD MUST READ) and others will be done in twenty minutes. It really does depend on the book and my experience with it.

As soon as it's ready to go it then gets left until a day or two before it's due to go live when I'll then go back to it, double check it for any glaring errors and do the odd tweak. Once I've written the review though I don't change anything outright, because I like keeping it as my thoughts when I'd read the book, not a week later when I've thought about it some more. Sometimes I'll add extra notes if the time away from the book has clarified or changed anything, but on the whole the review is how I felt in the couple of days after finishing.

Both of these ways of keeping track mean that I know what order I have to read the books I have in. It's a lot more structured than my old haphazard approach, but it means that I never miss release date deadlines or find myself scrambling to catch up with something I should have done a while ago. Less stress makes me a happy bean!

So that's my method of working, have I given you any ideas for helping to keep track of your blogging? Or do you have your own blogging schedule and methods? Let me know in the comments below!