One Year Anniversary!!!

Happy Birthday to meeee! Exactly this day, one year ago, I uploaded my very first post on the Booksmartie. 

It's been a great, sad, adventorous and exciting year for me - in the blogging universe and beyond - and in the next few days to come I want to share the highlights with you guys! I hope you enjoy!

Greetings, the Booksmartie

Looking Back on... My First Month of Blogging

Can you believe it? Because I can't. It feels like it was just yesterday, or say, last month that I slowly started typing my first book review. 

Back then, 

I had my nose stuck in my English textbook, devouring the section that dealt with book  reviews 

- tried to put some words together  that would eventually become a sentence. 

- Guess what? There was a handful of sentences at the end of the day

- but those sentences never became a blog post. I gave up and swore to never try again

- I was sure I could never do it. 

I didn't leave it at that, obviously. I took to Blogger again. After all, I had a design now and I knew what I wanted to do and everybody else - or so it seemed - could do it, too. 

So I tried again.

- this post that I started with the words "Hello Internet!" 

- I was shy and insecure and wanted to appear cool and confident 

- The only thing I  didn't want was for anyone I knew in person to find out (sooo embarassing!)

That's not to say I'm not proud of what I did in March 2012. My first blog entry might not have been a big hit and my first reviews weren't straight to the point, but I started and I tried and from that day on I never wasted a thought on quitting. Not once. 

My first real review (Veronica Roth's Divergent).

- Looking back on it now I realize I made one very big mistake - I was not completely honest. With myself, 

   that is.

- I was new to the blogging world and fascinated by how enthusiastic some people could get over books

- I wanted it, too. So I told myself I loved Divergent and had to write a raving review on it, although actually, I liked it - but was never completely obsessed with it. 

The complete opposite was Hush Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick. 

- I didn't like that book at all

- I was a bit nicer in that review than I would be today 

- still learned an important lesson when I had the review finished and uploaded 

- there is a way to write a negative review if you find the right words and the reasons why you didn't enjoyed

   the book.

I did memes on my blog from the very beginning

- it's a great way to interact with other bloggers because you have a topic to start awesome conversations

  with

- first meme I did was Feature & Follow Friday, the second  one Tune in Tuesday, I believe but that is a   

  topic for the April post.

There were Geeknotes, as well 

- where I shared thoughts that just came to my mind for a second

- I do consider starting that again...I think it's fun

- what do you think?

I wrote little introductions before I started the actual review

-that doesn't strike me as a bad idea, either

-would you like to have that again?

-because I think I would like to do that again....

By the way...do you like this format of the post better than long texts? Because I could get used to the keyword style :)

Tell me what you think in the comments!