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Tuesday, July 30, 2024

The History of WednesdayBookClub

Welcome! My name is GJ and this is my blog! This is just a quick intro/ history of for any newcomers




About 2007, I found a website called io9. It's a SFF website that just felt like built for me. It had insightful blog posts, quirky posts doing character studies, and breakdowns of TV shows I hadn't even heard about. I quickly fell in love and spent hours there. The commenters who frequented the site called themselves "Niners". If you're curious about what io9 itself means, here's a handy article from one of the founders.


Soon, I went from just commenting to playing around in their open forum, the ObservationDeck, may she rest in peace. There's where the Niners really went rampant. I can't really explain how amazing it was there but if you're millieniel who was chronically online, you might understand what I mean. It was a great community and I have friends from those days even now We had countless threads and hashtags. Music, random writing sprints, and of course, books. Someone started a thing called WednedayBookClub 


I actually have no memory of who started WednesdayBookClub but the format was simple: Every Wednesday, tell us what you've read/bought/are reading for the past week. Audiobooks and comics count.


I loved this idea because assigned reading isn't my thing. As a former homeschooler, I never had any assigned reading and I've never joined a traditional book club because my fear of potentially hating the book. But this? This I could get behind. I participated a few times and after a while I noticed that the posts just stopped. I didn't know who was doing. I didn't even know if it was specifically someone's thing but no one was doing the WednesdayBookClub posts anymore. So I started doing them again. I guess I just adopted it.





The rules stayed the same but with a few exceptions. I've added manga, picture books (For the parents stuck reading Dr Suess and "Good Night Moon") and fanfics. Because if fanfics don't count as literature, tell that to the schools teaching Shakespeare, Paradise Lost, and Ulysses, TYVM.


Over the years, the exact spot where we meet has changed. Io9's parent company, Gawker got bought by Univision and it went from hashtag to a part of the ObservationDeck to my kinja blog? It was confusing times. Still, so long as I could post, I did it. Something that started as a fluke became a habit, which became a love.  It didn't matter that only 3-5 people commented on a good week. During 2020, it was a small saving grace, a bit of normal in the midst of everything.


So when November 2020 came and Kinja killed the blogs, it was a rough day. Years of posts and moments lost in time like tears in th- I'm sorry, the reference was right there. I couldn't help myself.


But I missed it. I spent YEARS doing this. It became so much of my life, it was like a muscle memory. It left a big rift behind, bigger than I had expected. So after 3 months, I finally broke down and asked Twitter. Most of my mutuals are people I met on io9 and are the reason I even had a twitter account. If I was gonna resurrect something from O-Deck, I needed the Niners. 


Does that sound hyperbolic? A little but it's absolutely true. WBC didn't start with me, it didn't end with just me and it wouldn't start again with solely me.


And with a few votes and some guidelines, WednesdayBookClub lived again. I think this is the 3rd or fourth time I've had to resurrect this book club but by glob, I refuse to give up on her


 

And that's the story of WednesdayBookClub. I didn't have enough characters for the full name so I changed it to NinersBookClub because that's who the core audience is. And in April 2022, I did this tweet! 



Pretty innocuous, right? Welp, the OP followed me and put me on a list of book bloggers, which puzzled me. I'm not a book blogger, am I? Just because I have a small audience that regularly engages with my rants about books and I've been doing this for literal years doesn't mean anything! BTW, I don't know exactly when I started this but my first NaNoWriMo was 2013 and I was doing WBC posts during it so I've easily been at this for a decade. Which isn't that long until I did the math and realize that's a third of my life...


So after a day's worth of identity crisis mixed with some imposter syndrome, I leaned in and started this blog! I can't believe it took me this long to do this but I'm glad it did. If I had started this when I was younger, I would have burnt out or pushed myself to be something I wasn't rather than playing to my strength. Now I'm 33, I'm more willing to give up on books I don't love and eager to find books from diverse writers. I have a better understanding of writing techniques and skills. 


Not that I'm expecting to be a big blogger. Even nearly 2 years in, most of the people who follow me are Niners and honestly? I like it that way.


Don't get me wrong, WBC is for all, that's why I hold it in a more open spot than a Discord  but I love my friends. I love how weird and freestyle it can be, from people starting a discussion about 1950 SFF to one person livetweeting the terrible book they were reading (Thanks, LD. That was great).


But that's the story of my weird book club. I can't wait to see where it takes us!


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