I Stopped Blogging for a Year. Here's What Happened ...

Well, nothing really.  I mean, I wound up with more free time on my hands, but that's about it.

So why bother starting again?  (And not just starting again, but starting over completely?)

The simple answer is that I missed it.  I missed the regular interaction I had with some of my fellow bloggers.  I missed having a space of my own to share thoughts, ideas, experiences, and pictures.  I missed writing.  (I'll be totally honest here and say that I did not spend any time in 2017 on my writing.  Sad but true.)

I didn't fall off the grid completely in 2017.  I still used Goodreads and Instagram pretty regularly.  But that's not the same as blogging (especially since none of my Goodreads reviews went beyond a star rating).

So, here we are.  It's the first of a new year, and I'm starting fresh with a new blog.  (This is obviously a work in progress, as it's pretty bare bones right now.  I'm planning to change the overall look pretty soon, but I just wanted to get it up and running for now.)

I did consider picking back up with my old blog (Divulge and Indulge), but I decided against it for a couple of reasons.  First (and most importantly), I wanted to take my blog in a different direction.  The other reason was that I simply didn't want to deal with the shit show that my photos had become once Photobucket decided to be horrible.  (I clearly won't be hosting my photos for this blog on that site!)

What's different about the new blog?  (Other than the name and look, of course.)

• I want to focus more on books and reading in my posts.  Those were always my favorite posts to write when I was blogging at Divulge and Indulge, so it made sense to move in that direction.

• There will be fewer recipe/food posts.  I found recipe posts to be the most stressful because I felt like I constantly had to try new things and come up with ways to tweak recipes.  I work full-time, have hobbies in addition to cooking, and just don't always feel like spending a ton of time perfecting recipes and photographing my plates.  So that had to go.  (Don't worry if you were a fan of those posts, though.  I'll still share recipes and other food-related posts once in a while.)

• I'll be using fewer tags/labels for a cleaner look.  This is more for me than for readers, but hopefully other people can appreciate it as well.

• And (fingers crossed!), I will keep up with this blog and my social media accounts a little more.  (I even created a Twitter and Pinterest account for The Book Life, so I'm branching out!)  I got an Erin Condren planner for Christmas (yay!), so I'm planning (no pun intended) to put it to good use to organize both my personal and blog life.  We'll see how that goes.

Other than that, things will (mostly) be the same.  I'm still the same person, after all.

I was going to post my goals for 2018 in this post, but it's already pretty long.  I'll save those for my next post, and simply wish everyone a Happy New Year.