Changes are coming.
They’ve been brewing for a while, if I’m honest. When I first started this blog back in 2012, I had all of these idealistic goals to accomplish as a blogger. Make friends. Post every single day. And now, a few years later, my friends have stopped blogging. Stopped posting. In fact, a large majority of the bloggers I looked up to back then, the ones that inspired me to actually take a plunge and create a blog are not even blogging anymore.
I’m not going to lie, the thought to stop has crossed my mind these last few months. Blogging is fun. But it’s also the cause of so much pain and distress.
In the baby years of this blog I felt pressured to keep blogging no matter what. Every time I had to go on hiatus, I would always post an explanation and warning first. Now I just go.
I feel like back then, I was more involved in the community. I cared more about my readers, spent more time replying to comments and commenting back. But lately, I’ve kind of retreated back into my shell. It’s not that I don’t care about my readers, I do, I really, really do. But writing posts has always come more naturally than interacting with people, even online. And when time is short, and I’m forcing myself to chose one or the other, choosing new posts was the easy way out.
But by doing so, I stopped having as much fun. Even if commenting does take me a lot of time, it is something that brings me a lot of joy.
So I’m taking a hiatus. Not from the community, but from blogging.
I spend so much time playing catch-up to try to be able to publish new content every week. Between that and juggling college and attempting to have a social life, I don’t have time to comment, to discover new blogs. So I’m taking a break to dedicate more time to get back into the community. To schedule posts for May and beyond. To go back and edit all of my old posts.
I’ve done a lot of thinking. The need to start over, to start fresh is overwhelming. And yet, I cannot find it within me to delete everything I’ve ever posted up to this point. Yeah, there are posts I’m not too proud of and one’s I’d like to delete. But I’ve spent thousands of hours on this blog. It was like my child. It’s what kept me relatively sane through high school.
But if I keep doing what I’ve been doing these last four to five years, it will only drive me insane in college.
I guess the reason why I want to start over is that I want to take this blog in a new direction. Back in 2012, I could never imagine what was then known as Icy Cold Reads, as anything but a book blog. Boy, am I glad I decided to change the name to Paging Serenity. Because in a way, I’m still trying to find peace. Blogging peace.
It’s not that I no longer love books or writing about them. It’s just that after four years, I’ve gotten bored and there’re so many other things I have to share. Hence the changes.
When Paging Serenity comes back in May (after my second semester of college is over), it’ll be a little different.
Paging Serenity will be more of a lifestyle blog, with bookish and college/school related content.
As I make this transition, I promise not to fall off the face of the earth. I’ll still be active on #bookstagram. If not, come find me at BlogBound and yell at me there.
I hope you all enjoy the next couple of months.
This is not the end. It is just the beginning.
Emz, I totally support your new direction! I also completely understand what you mean. I know I felt a bit lost with my blog after graduating from college and entering full-time work. It was a transition and my blog fell by the wayside. While I loved blogging, I just couldn’t keep up with a book blog and went weeks sometimes months without posting. By accident (when I was in a lot of physical pain), I deleted all of my blogging content this past February. I was devastated that 3-years or so of blogging was gone. I’ve come to realize though it was an opportunity to sort of rebrand myself and start fresh like I am in life. So I’m 100% looking forward to seeing what your new direction will be like. Enjoy your break!
I completely understand! After I got my first job in 2015, my blog slowly got less and less content. Since then, I’ve struggled to get back into the book community the way I was when I first started. Sometimes you need to just take a break and figure out exactly what you want to do. I wish you all the luck in the world! If you end up saying goodbye to anything, remember that not all good things are easy to do!