A Pause for Thought and a Small Blog Teaser...

I've been a bad, bad girl this summer. (Blog-wise, that is).

Well, not as much as I was last summer (do you know what I did last summer?...drum roll...NOTHING. And yes, I almost-quoted a book and movie on purpose LOL).

Or, to be more precise: this year, at the beginning of the season, I signed up for the Summer Blogger Promo Tour by The Book Bratz, with the intent of 1) meeting new bloggers and 2) avoiding my usual summer blog slump and being forced to post at least once a week. I'll delve on the SBPT subject on Sunday 30th (which is the last day of the tour, when we get to recap the whole thing), but for now, I'll mention that it was both a success and a failure on my part. I was able to keep abreast of the whole thing, even easier than I thought I would, which is a success in itself :). Thanks to the tour, I did avoid the whole "closed for the summer" issue I dealt with last year. On the other hand, I pretty much stuck with the tour posts (both those on my blog and the ones I provided to my pals in exchange), if you don't count a short story review of Four Houses by Victoria Scott and a cover reveal for The Mark of Noba by GL Tomas. Not that I anticipated that I would have done much more back when I joined the tour, because I know myself too well, not to mention, my free time is a bit limited - but I sincerely hoped to be more active on my blog, aside from the SBPT thing.

...That's what I did this summer instead

I don't know if my posting almost exclusively in the SBPT area has anything to do with this, or if someone got fed up with following me for other reasons, or if they simply deleted their Google accounts...but I even lost two followers these latest weeks - which is not a small thing when you've been blogging for almost three years and only have (as of now) 91 of them :(. Well, of course, I don't have the time and wide-ranging appeal to build up a huge trail of followers. I hardly read new books because I can't afford to buy them at the moment, and I can't even read ebooks (which are much cheaper) because I'd need a credit card to be able to buy them from international online retails. Also, you usually need readers in order to get ARCs, but you need ARCs (among other things) in order to get readers *scratches head in confusion*. So, what can I expect?

I'm not going to whine though. I'm going to get my ass to work (so to speak, because BLOGGING SHOULDN'T BE EQUATED TO WORKING) and post - when I can, what I want, and to heck with the consequences. Now, that's what I'm planning to do next...

1. Post my last SBPT guest post on Sunday 23rd (I have Emily from Emily Reads Everything on my blog with her How to Fall in Love with Horror post, while I'm on The Book Bandit explaining why Indie Books Are Not Evil);
2. Participate in GL Tomas' The Mark of Noba blog tour on August 27th, with an excerpt from this new release;
3. Post my SBPT recap on August 30th;
4. Spark what I hope will be a lively and thoughtful discussion on ageism in the YA book blogging community, in the very first days of September;
5. Bring back my Screen Time feature (after a nine-months hiatus O_O) with a post about the original Heroes series, anticipating the launch of Heroes Reborn on September 24th in the U.S.A.;
6. ...And finally, write the long overdue review for Tick by Allison Rose, that I won in a giveaway back in JUNE *hangs head in shame*.

So, I've put my cards down on the table for everyone to see - I can't possibly take them back ;). Stay tuned...

Thanks to Giphy for the gifs! (Duh).