Published : 2021 || Format : print || Location : Colombia ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ What was it about the country that kept everyone hostage to its fantasy? The previous month, on its own soil, an American man went to his job at a plant and gunned down fourteen coworkers, and last spring alone there were four different school shootings. A nation at war with itself, yet people still spoke of it as some kind of paradise.. Thoughts : Infinite Country follows two characters - young Talia, who at the beginning of this book, escapes a girl’s reform school in North Colombia so that she can make her previously booked flight to the US. Before she can do that, she needs to travel many miles to reach her father and get her ticket to the rest of her family. As we follow Talia’s treacherous journey south, we learn about how she ended up in the reform school in the first place and why half her family resides in the US. Infinite Country tells the...
I've been book-blogging for four and a half years by now, and if I had to look at the big picture and say where it took me, I'd say nowhere.
I don't write for any publications.
I haven't written a book.
Heck, I haven't even been to BEA.
I haven't written fan-fiction.
And I still blog at the same place I started, all those years ago.
Yep, what a bummer. And I was saying that I'm going to write a book. Yeah, chuckles.
What about Erin Morgenstern? She decided to do NaNoWriMo and before long, she wrote a book, The Night Circus, that the world was going to talk about for a long long time.
So yeah, when I read those stories, and then look at my blog, there's a nice frown on my face. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't (and am not) desperate to be famous. But it's hard to read stories like these and not feel inspired to conquer the world - how you can do something very insignificant one moment and transform it to the next big thing.
Blogging for four-plus years has given me yearnings like that. But what I often neglect is the little moments that maketh this blog. That sweet comment, that one meeting, that fangirl moment, that outpouring of support. Small stuff that has happened over the past few years but have not gotten any of the swooning attention that a blog-to-movie achievement might bring.
In my very first year of blogging, the wonderful J-Kaye, who doesn't blog anymore, gave me a shout-out at her blog. Let me explain how important that was. Here I was, a little blogger posting meme after meme, not having found her niche yet, still trying to figure out what to blog about, staring at her email all day to receive one notification of a comment posted, and going to bed happy if even one really short "Hi, nice post" comment was posted on her blog. And then J-Kaye of all people mentions me. That's like President of the United States attention, in my books. Thanks to that one small token of appreciation, I was able to get myself out there. A very small matter, but significant, nevertheless.
When I showed up at my first IRL meetup with bloggers, I was super-nervous. What will they all think of me after they meet me? Will they still read my blog or secretly laugh behind my back? But Kathy, Jennifer, and Jaime were amazing and very awesome. After months of interacting with people online, it was welcome to meet some of them in person.
Three years ago, I faced my first big-time life-happens moment. My brother was hospitalized and I was shattered beyond what I can express in words. After much thought, I posted about it on my blog. I can never thank or fully reciprocate the amount of support I received that day. People shared my post, tweeted me their support, commented in hordes, and kept coming back. On that terrible day, I was able to smile once thanks to what the community did.
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Comments
I am just happy that we regular book bloggers are able to hold on to this little place on the web in spite of so many things going on in our lives.
Lisa @Just Another Rabid Reader
I love whenever I see a blogger make it big.