Coming Back to Blogging!

Hi!

Is anyone there?

Does anyone still follow this blog after my accidental 4-year hiatus?

Does the YA book blog community still exist??

Regardless, I'm coming back! I miss talking about YA with other people who are as obsessed with it as I am. 

What I've been up to since I stopped posting...

I stopped blogging in the summer of 2016, the summer I graduated from college and started grad school (and, honestly, the year before that my dedication to blogging was already pretty spotty) because I just wasn't willing to make time for this blog anymore. But I definitely did not abandon my love for YA! After graduating from college, I went on to get my MA in Comparative Literature, and wrote my Master's thesis about neoliberal diversity politics and Young Adult literature. I then went on to start a PhD program in English Literature and Critical Gender Studies, where most of my work has still been on race and sexuality in Young Adult literature and youth studies. Grad school can be kind of all-consuming, and since I was already reading and writing the whole time, I just couldn't get myself to do even more reading and writing for this blog. But I've still been thinking and writing about YA this whole time; just in significantly more formal and less fun spaces than this one....

Why I'm coming back to blogging...

The main reason is because I miss it! In my academic work I've started to talk more about online YA communities, and writing about teens' knowledge production and the way YA online communities can impact publishing trends has made me nostalgic for my days of participating in this world! I recently started writing reviews of the YA books again because I missed working through my thoughts on a book by writing them out, without planning on posting them anywhere but GoodReads. But if I'm already writing them, I figured I might as well post them on here too... Plus, I miss the YA community! I've seen that many of the bloggers I interacted with back in the day aren't blogging anymore, and I don't know if the YA book blog community is quite the same as it was 5 years ago, but I'm hopeful that some of you all are still out there, and that there are new YA lovers to get to know!

Also, ya know, what else am I supposed to do during quarantine!?

What to expect from this blog in the future...

There's no way I'll be able to post as much as I did during this blog's heyday--how in the world did I have the time to read 3 YA books a week and post 5 times a week?? Ah, right, by not having a life in high school...--but I am hoping to post at least once a week! During the summer I will probably even post more than that, but once school starts again reading and reviewing a YA book every week already sounds pretty ambitious.

I might also write some longer posts adapting some of my more academic thoughts on race and sexuality in YA to a more informal style and writing more about that here too!

Other than that, this blog will mainly just be YA book reviews, unless... are memes still a thing? Does anyone still do Top Ten Tuesdays and Waiting on Wednesdays? Someone catch me up on what I've missed and teach me how to YA book blog in 2020...

If anyone is still following this blog and actually reading this, thank you for sticking with me! And even if not... I'm just looking forward to writing book reviews again :)