This week I decided that I would get back into writing some posts for my blog. I hadn’t been on the site in a while, and when I logged onto it Monday morning, I found that I hadn’t posted anything since the end of December. I was shocked, and disappointed in myself. Then I took a step back and really thought about why I’ve gotten so behind. It’s not that I don’t have blogs ready to post, because I do even though I haven’t written any in a while. It’s more that I’ve been putting unreasonable goals onto myself.

Probably the best perk about working in publishing is access to books before publication. We get to read them far in advance, which, for someone (me) who has little patience when it comes to waiting for a book to come out (or waiting in general), is amazing. We jump on manuscripts as soon as they come in, compromising our preferred methods of reading (print over digital), and sometimes sleep, just to finally have it in our hands and be able to turn the pages. In the hallowed halls, we read and then rush over to our colleagues to either excitedly or upsetly discuss how much we loved or hated our newest conquest. The main characters’ joy become our joys, their fears our fears, their adventures our own. We are invested in these books: they are our world.

There is a downside to this as well though. For as excited as we get, we can only really talk about them amongst our colleagues: the outside world cannot share in our joy until the publication date. And by the time they are falling head-over-heals, as much as we’re bursting to share our thoughts with them, we’ve also already advanced to multiple favorites (hopefully) beyond them.

A second downside to this is my thinking that I need to blog about every single book that I read. Sometimes I’ll love a book and then try to force myself to write a review only to ditch it part of the way through (or all of the way) because I can’t figure out how to end it, or I don’t feel that it was written well enough. I found myself feeling like it was more of a chore than actually enjoying the process; I had lost the meaning of why I started this blog in the first place – which was because I love to write and share my thoughts. I don’t have to write about every single book I read, because let’s face it, I’m literally always reading. And that’s okay. We all have goals that we want to achieve, and that’s great, but, we have to be willing to admit when they’re unreasonable and need tweaking. For me. That’s this blog. So, with that being said, I’m going to give myself a break, breathe, and just have fun with this again. After all, we can all stand to treat ourselves a bit better at times.