Though it happened a couple of weeks ago and I’m not entirely sure of the date because WordPress’s alert would not tell me (and I can’t remember), some time at the end of March marked the ten-year anniversary of this blog. I consider this milestone to be a pretty big deal despite how unorganized I’m being about this.

Over the years, things were a bit shaky in terms of output. I knew I wanted to review books, but I also wanted to use this as a vehicle to publish thoughts and ideas about all sorts of storytelling media (which I’ve largely left in the past). I remember I started with the idea of posting something every Tuesday, which I recall doing fairly consistently, but I sometimes had to stretch for an idea of what to post when a review wasn’t at the ready to be written. Eventually, blogging became more habitual and I found I could make myself more flexible with when I posted, and I became a lot more confident with my book reviews.

Turns out a weekly schedule of some sort did still come in handy though, as I feel I owe a lot to WWW Wednesday for giving me a weekly meme to take part in that gives me a good excuse to post updates about what I’m reading; of course, I could have just posted updates on my own, but the participatory aspect gave me the nudge that I really needed.

There are many simple things I should have done for this blog in all this time that I just haven’t, most of which I’ve probably not even thought of, but I’m proud that I’ve been able to keep this thing going, regardless of changes in my schedule, for so long. Consistency is the one thing I feel I did right in terms of admin, and I’m routinely pleased with the amount of traffic my existing posts manage to bring in. Time was that I was anxious about how many likes each new post got, but I’m happy it never stopped me from posting. There’s no guaranteed way to make it big, but if you keep at something there’s a good chance of some sort of returns, however modest.

As a note on something I’m particularly proud of, I started reading the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett in 2016, and to date I’ve read 24 novels from that series; each novel has a corresponding review on this blog, and I intend to keep that going.

Furthermore, here’s a small list of five book reviews I’m particularly proud of:

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Tomie by Junji Ito

Into the Unbounded Night by Mitchell James Kaplan

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

I’m sure there’s more if I revisited things in more depth, but these always stick out in my mind. I’m sure I could go on about this milestone, but I wanted to keep this brief while still allowing myself to acknowledge this as something of a big deal for me.

Thank you to everybody who has stuck with me over the years or just stopped by to read a post or two.

Thank you for reading.