Blogs I Read

There are, at last count, 71 blogs on my blog reader (I use feedly, in case anyone is interested). Not all of these are active blogs, and there are some that I added in there two years ago that haven't posted since. But there are a lot of great blogs I read every day, and I thought I'd share some of them with you.

Some of these blogs are huge blogs with big followings that I really like, and others are the undiscovered tiny blogs of my internet friends which are still awesome, even if they lack a large audience. I follow a few pretty specific types of blogs, so I'll try to roughly organize them by type.

First, the homeschooling blogs. There are many, many homeschool blogs on the web, and I find them very interesting to read. While I read a lot of them, the ones I'm highlighting here are by families in my local area.

Little Earthling Blog

This is the blog of a homeschooling family with 14 kids, who actually live in my local area. I was in Girl Scouts with several of their kids at one point, and though we don't really know them personally anymore, I enjoy following Renee's blog. She has lots of great photography, and a lot of honest commentary about what it is to raise 14 kids, particularly since several have special needs that have changed their family's life considerably. 

Classically Homeschooling

This is the blog of a homeschooling family that I have known for many, many years. Sara only started blogging pretty recently, and she blogs about all sorts of things related to homeschooling.

Next, some writing blogs. I follow a lot of these, but here are just a few highlights.

Dragons With Typewriters 

This is the blog of a friend of mine, who I have known since I was about 7. His mom actually writes Classically Homeschooling, the blog highlighted above. Ian writes about writing, books, and more. 

The Mind's Elbow

This blog, also written by a mom of one of my friend's from our homeschool group, isn't actually active anymore. It has a great backlog of writing prompts and stories to read, though. 

Now, for some blogs that aren't actually written by people I know. These are kind of miscellaneous blogs about various topics, and are all large, popular websites.

Forever Young Adult

I know I've talked about FYA before on this blog, but it doesn't hurt to say again: I love this website. They have amazing reviews of new young adult books, plus they talk about TV shows, movies, and more. 

Doctor Grumpy in the House

This is a humorous blog written by an anonymous doctor. He tells stories about amusing events in his practice or stories that readers have sent in, and they are pretty hilarious, though they might not appeal to everyone. Unfortunately, the RSS feed on his site hasn't been working for a while, but hopefully he'll be able to take care of that soon.

WIL WHEATON dot NET

This is the blog of the amazing Wil Wheaton: actor, writer, and geek extraordinaire. This is definitely the biggest blog I am linking to today. Wil is really an amazing writer, and his blog is written in a very personal fashion, making it feel like a lot of the smaller blogs I read. He tells a lot of personal stories, talks about his kids and his dogs, and occasionally promotes his work. I highly recommend following him if you are into geek internet culture. 

There you have it, some great blogs you should read. Obviously, I read a lot more blogs than just this, but these are definitely ones I recommend you read too.

My Favorite Things: Blogs

This post is kicking off a series I'm calling "My Favorite Things." Since I already talk a lot about books and stuff on here, this is going to be a chance for me to talk more about some of my favorite things I don't usually discuss. Today, it's blogs, and over the next few weeks I have plans for posts on computer games, YouTube channels, and basically all the other fun stuff I do that takes up too much of my time. :)

Today, I'm going to highlight a few blogs I like to read. Honestly, I have way too many blogs that I check on regularly, and many more then that in my RSS feeder. Because of that, I was pretty worried when Google Reader was retired, but I've since been using Feedly, which works okay, though I don't love it.

I'm going to separate these blogs into categories, since I tend to read blogs for a few reasons: homeschooling blogs, blogs of people I know, and reading or writing blogs. Some of the blogs of homeschool families I follow have very different values and beliefs then my family, which is one reason I find them so interesting to follow. Also, many of the blogs of people I know are actually homeschooling families.

Blogs of People I Know

A Baker's Dozen and Apollo XIV

A Time for Every Purpose

Boots Before Corset

The Smog Blog

Book and Writing Blogs/Websites

The Office of Letters and Light

History of the (Whole) World

Read More! (this one almost fit in the people I know category, but I decided to leave it here.)

Pretentious Title

Forever Young Adult

Go Teen Writers!
 
Homeschool Blogs

Life In a Shoe

Large Families on Purpose


As I said before, I read MANY blogs, but these are some of the highlights. What blogs do you read?

Life Update! {More Blog Stuff, School, Books, and the Future}

Today, I'm just here to post a quick update on what I've been up to. I'm going to divide this post into sections for easier writing, and hopefully, reading.

Bloggy Stuff!

Let's start out with some semi-serious stuff. First of all, I'm realizing that a few things about how I've been blogging just aren't sustainable. First of all, Homeschool Fridays have been kind of a bust. I often don't get around to posting them, and I always feel like they are not as well written out as I would like. As a result of this, the "Graduating Highschool" part of my blog is going to become more literal. While I still intend to post about homeschooling related stuff the way I have in the past, I have a whole new format coming up that I hope will work a little better.

This all new Homeschool Fridays, which will be kicking off tomorrow, will be weekly school updates. I'm going to go through each subject (as it makes sense to do so),  and talk a little about what I did, what I didn't do, and what I hope to do next week. If you're a homeschooling family (particularly with younger kids), maybe you can get some ideas, and you can see how a particular curriculum or method works in a real life situation. My main goal with this, however, are a little more personal. I hope that this will help keep me accountable, and I want it to be a record of my sophomore year of high school.

If you're not sure how this is going to work, come back tomorrow to find out. My current plan is to try this out for a month, and see how it goes. If it's not working out, maybe I need to find a different way of doing homeschool posts.

Books

I love writing book reviews, and in fact, it's my favorite part of this blog. This fall, I hope to review every book I read. That might not mean a lot of book reviews, however, since I just started A Game of Thrones on Monday. I'm loving it so far, but it's not a short book. And, when I finish it, there are four more that all seem to be that size, or maybe larger. I don't know how long it'll take me to get through them, but be warned, there might not be a lot of review coming up.

To help compensate, I'm going to try to post reviews (or at least thoughts) on books I'm reading for school.

The Future

Maybe this should have come under the Blog Stuff heading, but I think it makes more sense here. I have a few long term plans and thoughts about this blog at the moment. The first of those is that I have a few sponsored book reviews coming up in the next few weeks, which is a lot of fun. I like doing those, because we (the company and I) both win. While I don't get paid, I get a new book or other cool product free to review, and they get some publicity.

I also have some exciting plans for the blog in 2014 that I might be talking more about soon.

Also, here are some posts to look out for soon:

Two sponsored book reviews.
A writing post (it's been WAY too long since I did one of those).
A HF post tomorrow.
A post about blogs I read.
A review of the tv series Angel.
Some NaNo prep posts (I can't believe it's already time to do those!).

BEA, Blogging, and a Teen Writing Conference!

I'm sorry it's been a bit quite on here lately. I have some fun review posts that I'm working on right now, but today I thought I'd just ramble a bit. Over the next few weeks, look for posts reviewing Eleanor and Park (Rainbow Rowell), Messenger (Lois Lowry), Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury), and Star Trek: Into Darkness, the new Star Trek movie, which I saw yesterday. I'm also working on a post about the Great Gatsby movie.

In the mean time, here is a random list of things I've been doing and thinking about recently.

1. A new dream of mine is to attend Book Expo America someday. While I would love to go to all three days as an "industry professional," just going the one day it is open to the public would be absolutely AMAZING! I would be happy to pay the $49 for a ticket, but I would still need to get to New York City somehow... Someday, this is something I really want to do!

2. I am going to a teen writing conference in a few weeks that is being held locally. I am super excited for the speakers, all the break out sessions to choose from, and advice from actual writers working in the field. It will be awesome to spend a whole day with other teenagers who are as excited about writing as I am!

3. I wanted to talk a little bit about how I blog, and why sometimes there isn't much going on here. I rarely write posts the day they go live, though this one is an exception. As soon as I finish writing it, I will publish it. Usually, I will write up a few posts at a time, and then schedule them to be posted later. With blogger, it does it all for me, and they go live without me doing anything. When I get particularly busy, if I miss one day of writing blog post, that means three or four posts don't get written and scheduled. Then, often a week or so goes by before I really realize how long it has been. It's not the best method of blogging, and I don't like it all the time, but it makes it easier to blog when I am so busy. Hopefully this summer I will have more time to blog once I have less school to do.

That's it for today. I hope to have at least two new posts up next week.