Mary Had a Little Book Blog Turns 3

Wow. Three years, huh? Hardly seems like any time has gone by at all.... Wait, no, that's a lie. Three years is a long time, and in that time I have gone through several Big Life Changes such as:

I moved to Dallas

I started working at a science museum

I moved again (still in Dallas)

Job at the science museum changed

I moved again (still in Dallas)

Job at the museum changed again

And again (yay, big promotion)

And again (SO MANY RESPONSIBILITIES)

And one more time (ummm....wut)

I got a second job at the library (wheeeee!)

I quit the museum

I moved again (still in Dallas)

I got a promotion at the library (WHEEEEEE!)

I'd say this has been probably the most impactful three years of my life, and through it all, I've had the book community at my back. But....this year, trying to juggle both jobs was more difficult than I ever expected, and I had to take an unexpected and unannounced break from the blog. Sure, I missed talking to you guys about books, but I was still doing that on Twitter only minus the stress of formatting and sounding "official" or whatever and page views and unique visitors and HTML and images and all that other stuff that will occasionally make you go insane. It's not exactly that I lost sight of the blog, but I felt like the blog wasn't what I wanted it to be. I was tired and facing an extreme bout of depression. Taking a mental breather was good.

Eventually I fell in love with ya again (2015 marked an upswing in the number of new adult and romance titles I read and a severe decrease in ya), and then I missed blogging more than I was glad to be taking a break. Hence, my glorious return! Huzzah! Seriously, it's good to be back. But now, rather than posting every day because I feel like I have to, even if I don't have anything unique or interesting to say, I have no problem waiting a few days. Suddenly I am made of chill when it comes to the blog, rather than being an obsessive weirdo. It was not a good look for me.

Ironically, though, the blog/my platform did hit a couple really amazing milestones statistically. During my break, I reached 100,000 total page views and in November, I reached 3,000 Twitter followers. You can't live and die or blog by stats, but I remember how excited I was when I hit 1,000 page views overall (it took four months) and how excited I was when I hit 1,000 page views in a month (it took another two months) and how excited I was when I hit 1,000 page views on a post (it took.... several months more). Those numbers are not indicative of the quality of anything, but.... it's still cool to think that sometimes I have something to say and people are listening (because even all the times I've looked at my blog while messing with the format or whatever doesn't equal 100,000 worth of hits).

So thank you guys for sticking in there with me. Thanks for reading and commenting and subscribing and sharing!

Love,
Mary

PS Totally going to do some giveaways this month. Just fyi.