Writing vs. Blogging

Earlier today, Jami at YA Addict posted a discussion about whether or not aspiring writers should be book blogging. The idea was that if you give someone a negative review, you're burning bridges in the publishing industry before you even get to them. I hadn't even thought about that as being an issue. Writing is a huge part of who I am, and so is reading. Most writers say that if you're going to write well, you have to read a lot - the two are related. So why would it be a problem to write and blog about books? Asking me to choose between the two would be like saying "Okay, you can cut off your right arm, or you can cut off your left arm. Ready, go."

If I had to choose between ever being a published author and continuing to blog about books, I'd choose being an author in a heartbeat. I blog about books because I love reading and I want to share the books I read with other people, but I can share books with friends even without a blog; maybe I'd only be sharing them with a few people that I talk to regularly in the "real world," but it's better than not being able to talk about them with anyone. But if I had to stop writing...that would be like cutting out a part of my soul.

What I don't get is why anyone should have to choose. I understand that no author likes seeing a negative review of his or her book, and most likely the publishers/editors/agents don't either - a huge number of people put a huge amount of time into that book, and then somebody has the nerve to go and say they didn't like it? It makes sense - I would be unhappy too. But the fact of the matter is, not everybody is going to like every single book. If everybody liked the same things, that would be...well, really weird. Very Brave New World. Scary. Not cool. If you have an opinion, there's going to be people who agree with you AND people who don't agree with you. That's how the world works.

Personally, I think that as long even the negative reviews are polite, there shouldn't be a problem. I for one don't like writing negative reviews; I wish I could enjoy every book I read and always be able to say "Yes! You should absolutely read this one too! It's excellent!" But that doesn't always happen. So my policy on that is going to be that unless I've specifically agreed to review a certain book and I end up disliking it, I won't review books that I don't like. And if I do have to post a negative review, I'll be as nice as I can about it. Just because I wasn't the biggest fan of a book doesn't mean that I can't understand why somebody else would be.

So that's my spiel for the day. It rather popped my "happy bubble" when I saw that maybe people who like to write shouldn't be blogging about books, I will admit. I was all excited because I've wanted to create something like Bookworm Boulevard for ages and ages and ages, and then somebody says "...you know that by doing this thing you love, you may be ruining your chances to do this other thing that you love." But I read something just the other day about a book blogger turned author, and I'm going to hold to the idea that the same is going to be possible for me someday.

I guess this has been rather more serious than most of my posts. But this is something that matters to me. What do y'all think?

~Bex