Hey, reader gang, I'm blogging again!

It has been a hot while since I brushed the dust off my Wordpress account. But here's the question: why did blogging stop working for me? Well, my literary friends:

  • I had a bit of a book-reviewing existential crises.

Ok, so hear this one out. Back in my early days of uni, I wanted to dive down the career path of publishing. After a few careers events and conversations with alumni, I realised that writing negative reviews can scupper your chances in the publishing world before you've walked through the door. Just think: an editor reads through your application, checks out your blog and realises you've trashed a book on their list back in the day. It isn't a good look. If I was going to find a place in the publishing world, I needed to delete negative reviews and think carefully about who might read future ones. Suddenly, the whole concept of book blogging lost its appeal and I felt fake.

Around this time, I also started to find writing reviews more difficult. With a book review, your thoughts need to be collected, concrete and concise, ready to slap onto the internet before moving onto the next shiny new novel. I found my ideas and opinions constantly shifting, so I would cringe at a review even a week after posting. Basically, I am not a book reviewer.

  • I stopped reading so many YA books.

I cannot express how many words I have read over the last three years of uni. I literally cannot, because they are not on Goodreads and, most likely, no one cares. Honestly, seminar reading is not a fun and interesting thing to post on the internet and I didn't really want to think about it again after it was over. That said, there were plenty of things that I was fascinated by and I wanted to post about it. Also, I started to shift from publishing dreams to historian dreams and I didn't know how to navigate my blog through this. Did YA readers care about my opinions on historical themes? I DIDN'T KNOW, OK?

  • I was an editor for the student newspaper!

This was super fun, but it meant that my blogging time became newspaper editing time. My ideas were used for newspaper articles instead of blog posts and I don't regret it.

  • People I knew irl found my blog and I became self-conscious.

Now, me being self-conscious is an easy feat to achieve and I felt like a pretty stupid 19/20 year old who still read YA books. But then I realised: they may think I read trashy YA books, but I also finished my seminar reading every week so who wins really? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

  • I wrote pretty much an entire book over my final year of uni!!!

I had been working on the thing for a while, but I wrote around 90,000 words over my third-year. If you don't know already, that is a very healthy book length! Anyway, writing takes many thoughts and ideas and so that sort of dried up the old blog. It was also pretty much the only thing that kept me sane, so no regrets there either.

So what is going to happen differently this time?

  1. I won't try to be an xyz blogger. Anything goes around here now!
  2. I'm going to write about any types of books I feel like, even if it's a thick non-fiction history that nobody cares about except me.
  3. I will stop trying to write book 'reviews' and will write book 'responses' instead. Think random observations about a book that got me thinking or a post about wider issues in the book world.
  4. History posts! Who cares if it doesn't fit the usual book blogger formula? I'm going to tell you all about the hilarious and surprising and stupid and inspiration things I've found while historianing.

I think the main problem is that I find it difficult to combine my historian side with my literature side (joint honours problems). People online are going to be confused if I jump between niches, right? But I've decided to just go with it and see what happens! After all, my life goal is to become a (public) historian by day and an author by the night.* Wow, Mimi, two equally unattainable career ambitions at the same time?!?? Maybe one will work out, who knows? Subsctibe to The Scribbler's Shack to find out! *hint hint

*don't you know? us writer types don't need sleep