Changes In The Format At Thoughts...

Earlier in the year, I had all sorts of time to dedicate to fun stuff like reading and writing and blogging. Over the last few months, things have been changing in my life. I am now working 30 hours a week and I have to budget my time a lot more wisely than I used to. Sadly, I’m not the type of person who wants to change things. I like to keep things all the same and don’t like seeing wrenches throw off my routine. It is hard for me to admit that I need to make some adjustments, but they have become necessary if I want to have certain things remain in my life.

I love my blog. I really, truly do. It has opened up all sorts of awesome and I don’t know what kind of person I would be today without it and the friends I have made. I have no idea what I would be spending my time on if I hadn’t started it. I certainly wouldn’t have read as many books or chosen to write and self-publish a novel. My writing probably wouldn’t have gone anywhere. And my wonderful blogging friends, something would certainly feel missing if I didn’t have you to chat with. My life would be pretty boring without you.

Unfortunately, keeping up with it all is not as easy as I thought it would be. It has been getting harder since the job change. Writing my reviews and other posts takes up a lot of time that I don’t have to spare. Visiting all my friend’s blogs is proving to be more difficult than it used to be. I can manage to read a decent amount of posts but I can’t comment on the majority of them. Which is probably part of the reason why I don’t get too many comments these days. Plus, replying to all of the comments I do receive on here has been just as difficult.

Okay, I’m talking too much. I need to reach the point. The point is this: I am going to redo the format here at Thoughts. I am going to condense things down to a more manageable routine rather than complicating things. Here’s what you can expect in 2013 from me…

Update Thursday and Sunday Replay will be no more

I have this somewhat obsessive compulsive tendency to hate changing some specific things. One of those things has always been my Update Thursday. It is the longest running thing I have done on this blog. I didn’t want to give it up because it just felt like it was part of this blog and needed to always be there. And then I decided to do Sunday Replay to split up different aspects of the blog. It has been rough to keep up with them both. I first thought that maybe I could give up Sunday Replay and condense it into Update Thursday. Then I realized that as attached as I am to Update Thursday, I don’t want to do it on Thursday anymore. I started it on that day because I used to have that day off work 95% of the time. I don’t anymore.

Instead, I am going to start a new weekly update on Fridays to wrap up the whole week. In this update, you will see what I’ve read and what I’m currently reading. I will also post the current word count on whatever my writing work in progress is, but I will no longer list the rest of my story ideas or talk about my writing. I will list links to my posts for the week like on Sunday Replay, but you will no longer see links to posts on other blogs. I may sometimes post a paragraph about something happening in real life, but probably not every week. I haven’t decided on a name for this update yet.

Everything Else

I will not be participating in Stacking The Shelves anymore (except maybe one last one on what I got in December the first week of January, I haven't decided on that yet). I really am not much of a fan of memes. When I first started out I liked them a lot because I was able to gain new followers and find new blogs. Almost every time I’d post one, I would have an overwhelming amount of comments to reply to and hauls to visit. I ended up spending probably half an hour to an hour doing this alone (not to mention the time to put it together to begin with). I liked checking out all the new books everyone got, but it kept me online far too long and other things I needed to do got ignored. So, I had to cut this out.

I will still have at least one review a week, most likely posted every Tuesday as usual.

I am going to make sure to have some sort of reading, writing, or blogging type post a week again. I fell out of that routine partway through the year and I missed talking about those things. Part of the reason why is because I either couldn’t come up with something new to talk about or had trouble writing my thoughts out. Instead of coming back to it at a different time, I just never got back to it. Hence, no new articles. I want to remedy this by putting something up every Monday, either a discussion post or a Question Of The Moment.

I would also like to post a random post once in awhile (maybe once a month or two) that is personal. It will be pretty much along the lines of my On My Mind posts from the middle of this year.

My writing blog

I started to do a couple memes over on that blog and they were fun to write. But, you know how I feel about memes. I don’t want to do a them to gain a bunch of followers. I want to get followers to follow me because they WANT to know more about my writing and the books I intend to publish.

I will be doing a weekly update on Friday that details my current writing a little bit. It will show my current word count and also a brief paragraph about what I’m working on. I may also post writing concerns, possibly on that post or maybe even in another post. I plan on also posting more conversations with my friend Rebecca because those amuse me and add a more personal feel to the blog.

I will also be moving Music Monday over to this blog. I probably won’t be able to participate every week but I want to share some of the songs or albums I have been listening to that are inspiring my writing.

And that’s it!

I want to be part of the book blogging community still. I don’t want to leave it at all. The times are changing though--some of it real life responsibility and some of it my writing career. So, some adjustments have become necessary. I thought it would be good to inform you all of this so that you don’t worry that I’m gone because you won’t be seeing my weekly posts or other regular features on here. I am not leaving! I will be here in a slightly smaller and shorter format. And I promise I will do my best to keep up with all of you guys as well, but please don’t hate me if I’m not commenting as much on here or on your blogs. I will be reading them when I can and commenting when I can. Being a writer on a mission to get published is hard work. I don't know how they do it... guess I'm going to find out!

I love all of you guys tons and hope to keep seeing you on my blog and keep seeing you on your own blogs! Have a great day!