I start back to work this week, and I’m pretty positive that having two kids (one of whom is an infant) is going to negatively impact my ability to live life (and sleep. We can’t ever forget the lack of sleep.). In regards to this, I’ve been thinking about how to run my website while I will be going through another adjusting phase. I realized two things:

1. I read a lot of books I don’t end up reviewing for one reason or another. Sometimes I don’t want to. There are some books I read I read just because I want to and I don’t really feel the need to review those. Another reason is because I read a lot of books and I just don’t have time to write a full length review for them all, so I push them down the list thinking I will get to them someday, and then I forget and they never get reviewed. I read about 200 books a year, so a lot slip in the cracks.

2. I don’t ever post news items, and I should.

In realizing these two things, and analyzing how chaotic life is about to become, I realized that I don’t always have time to write a full length review, but I do generally almost always have time to bust out a paragraph or two a day. Therefore, I’m going to be rolling out “Book Bites.” Book Bites will be my attempt to shine more light on more of the books I read. I do believe that every book deserves some attention, and hopefully Book Bites will be something that will help me do that.

I will still write my full length reviews, hopefully 2-3 times a week like I currently am, but realistically I realize that until my life slows down a bit (ha ha) I won’t always have time to sit down and write a long review. Book Bites will be short paragraph or two reviews for all those other times. These short paragraphs will get right to the meat of the books I read (for an example, look at my mini SPFBO reviews). Furthermore, I’ll also hopefully (eventually) be adding more news to the website. This could be anything from press releases that publishers send me, to things I think of myself (which will be rare because honestly I don’t really notice much besides diapers these days), to books I get in the mail.

So things will be changing. I will hopefully have more content on my website that will take less time for me to produce. This is how things will look so you’ll know what to expect:

Featured Review | Book Title – Author’s Name
This is going to be a full length, regular style review

Book Bite | Book Title – Author’s Name
This will be a short paragraph or two book review

News | Insert title here
Will be anything from press release, to whatever else

Books in the mail
Books I got, hopefully I’ll remember to do this once a week.

Eventually I hope to change the layout of my website to make all of this easier for people to access, but until I have the time or brainpower to do that, I will make it a goal to tag each post to make it easier for people to find them. I am also going to start tagging all my reviews with their star rating because I’m too far behind (and too lazy) to update the various review indexes, though I will leave them as-is for people who care.

So, that’s the way things will go for a while. My goal is that this will help me give more of the books publishers and authors send me at least a little bit of attention, while also taking away some of the stress I feel when I’m having a really busy week and I just don’t have time to write 2-3 really long reviews of books. It will also allow me to mix up my content more, and hopefully make this website more active while giving me a bit more time away from it to do things like work and change diapers.

We’ll see how it goes, but this is my goal right now. I do feel kind of guilty that I won’t be writing long reviews on all the books I read, but on the other hand, at least I’ll be giving more books more limelight, so hopefully this will be a good change.

And a huge thanks for sticking with me while my life is kind of upheaved and I’m in adjustment (and exhausted) mode.