As We Come to the End...

It's been a difficult week. I'm not going to tell you that all that's happened has left me unbothered or that I've somehow managed to let it not affect me personally, because that hasn't been the case at all. I started book blogging years ago, before it was established the way it is today, and I started because I loved books. I loved reading them, talking about them, analyzing them, and sharing my opinions with others. I wanted to talk about relatively unknown books, ones that were great, ones I loved, but that nobody else seemed to be reading. I wanted to share them with others. I thought that once I were published - if I were published - the rules would change for me in regards to reviewing and I fully intended to give up reviewing when/if that happened. 

I don't think I realized that the reviews I wrote now and the opinions I shared now, pre-agented, pre-publication, could hurt me later. To be perfectly honest when I jumped into book blogging I had no idea that anyone in the publishing industry would ever look at what I wrote. I was a reader and they were authors/agents/editors/publicists. We existed in different worlds that I didn't think would collide.

But they did. As it turns out, the world really is just as small as they say and the thought that I might have hurt someone by reviewing their book doesn't sit well with me. Part of what I love about running a YA book blog is the opportunity to support the community and the industry so much more vocally than I could by just being a reader. I want to continue doing this.

However, I also want to write. And I don't want my future relationships with those in the publishing industry to be sullied by things I may have said as an unpublished aspiring author, even if those things were said with the best of intentions. I love writing reviews. I love blogging. I love being a part of this world.

But I can't approach things from only the reader's perspective anymore. I want to be more than that. And I can't be a writer when it suits me and "just a reader" when it suits me -- it doesn't work and I know, especially now, how that could be hurting others. How it could end up hurting me.

So this week has been terrible and difficult and tear-inducing, but I have to make some changes. It's a personal decision about me and where I am in my writing life. 

• I've set my Goodreads account to private and deleted most of the friends I had there. I've also gotten rid of any Goodreads reviews (but not ratings). I mostly use the site for my own personal reading record anyway and don't really see a need to keep that public.
• I'm shutting the blog down. I haven't decided yet whether this will mean closing it altogether or just shutting off comments and not posting anymore while keeping up everything I've already done. 
• I'm starting a new blog, with a more personal and writing focus. I won't be reviewing books anymore and it won't be a book blog, but I will be talking about some of the books that I love, doing the more personal-style reading posts, and talking about writing.

I have loved running this blog and hope you'll follow me to my next blogging venture at the & Story blog. (It's not much yet, I know.)

Thank you for reading. This will be my last post on Ten Cent Notes.