I am writing reviews faster than I can post them.
The result is that I always feel behind and don’t like to let a day go past when I don’t get a review posted — and I’m still not going to catch up.
This is not sustainable.
I have the illusion that I can catch up — because in 2018, when I was on the Newbery committee, I did!
But how did I catch up? By not posting any new reviews for a full year! Or at least no reviews of Newbery-eligible books.
And even posting zero new reviews, it did take me the entire year to catch up on posting back reviews!
I currently have 219 reviews waiting to be posted. And I keep writing reviews faster than I can post, so I’m getting more and more behind.
Now, when I say “write” a review — I’m using drafts on the blog to keep reviews ready to post. When I say “post” a review — I mean make a webpage for my main sonderbooks.com site. And then I add the new title to the index, add links to books by the same author, and update “Previous Book” and “Next Book” links for the books before and after it. All this takes me 30-45 minutes per review.
Now, I recently revised my website to be more mobile-friendly — *and* to make it easier to post new reviews. However, I’ve already got a few thousand reviews posted, and until they get moved to the new format (takes about five minutes each) — it still takes a good amount of time to post a new review.
So, I need to change my habits.
My first thought was after a review is a year old, I need to just delete it and forget about it. But that makes me sad.
And then I realized that all it takes to publish the reviews on the blog is hit the Publish button. So instead of deleting the old reviews, why don’t I simply publish them on the blog? I can make getting a review page on my main site a little more exclusive.
In fact, it would be nice to get to the place where I write reviews and immediately post them to the blog — then simply make webpages for my favorites as time permits. Though I’d have to really keep a good list of what’s posted and what’s not.
So — let’s see if I can catch up on those 219 back reviews! Going forward, I’m going to try to publish one blog post per day, starting with the ones I wrote the longest time ago. I will also keep trying to post review pages on my main site, but I hope that will take off some of the pressure.
Meanwhile, happy reading!