I have been very used to “trying new things” by adding more and more things. For example: tried writing a book, tried publishing & marketing, tried being consistent on Instagram, tried a bunch of courses, etc. But this year is the first time I tried something new by removing something – the pressure to blog – for three months.

And I gotta say, it’s been a great three months. I don’t think I was particularly productive (i.e. I did not end up reading more than usual) but I did manage to do a few things that I’ve been wanting to do:

• I wrote fiction (albeit fanfiction) for the first time in years
• I actually managed to try writing some non-fiction essays (okay they are short) which are very different from my normal travel recaps
• I did a very slow book review that I’m still somewhat working on

All in all, three months away produced 3 book reviews and 4 short essays, which is actually not a lot. But it did make me realise more strongly than ever that the energy I have for hobbies has reduced greatly over the years. It’s one thing to be working from home and planning time for writing and blogging and Instagram photos when your factory is closed and you don’t actually have that much work, it’s another thing to be trying to juggle all that when you’re back to a full-time load.

And the thing is, I want to try writing new and different things! Aka the short essays that I mentioned and that I will be posting soon; I find them a lot of fun to think about and write. (Also, I wanted to try substack but that would mean giving up this blog because at this point, I can only focus on one thing at a time so I’m shelving that thought).

So for the rest of the year, I’ll be back but in a different way:

• Book reviews will still be written but much more selectively. I’m also trying to break my need to have an “acceptable” number of books read/reviewed on Goodreads so I’m moving to a pen-and-paper style of tracking/book review for most books this year. And I’m not actually putting a goodreads goal which I think is the first in years!
• Tea reviews will probably be more or less gone, sorry! What I realised this season is that I don’t have the time and patience to sit through so many tea sessions. Tea is still a comfort and a bonding agent but that means that most of the time, my focus isn’t so much on the taste of the tea. I do have one tea post planned – a comparison of smoked teas but in general, if I write tea posts they won’t be reviews (which means fewer tea posts in general too)
• Blog hopping will be on a reduced basis too – I realised that I didn’t blog hop much during this break even though I wanted to (I think I just focused my energy on other things), so I’ll be popping around once or twice a month rather than once or twice a week like before. I hope I won’t miss too much though, I really do enjoy reading everyone’s discussion posts and reviews!

On a more immediate note, I will have some free time this week because it’s going to be the Hari Raya holidays so I will restart blogging by posting my Okinawa travel posts/essays; I really hope you enjoy this. After that, I do have a backlog of posts that I wrote before the pause and a bit last week (while I was in NZ – still figuring out if there’s anything that I want to write about from that, it’s a slow process) so you’ll see a few book reviews after. After that well… I haven’t figured out what blogging schedule I want to have or if there will be one, but everything will be based on what I mentioned in the points above.

I hope you’ll stay with me for the rest of the year! This will be a pretty interesting year for me – I think I’ve been blogging consistently for half a decade (I dare not check but definitely at least that long!) but all these changes feel very new to me for some reason!