Celebrating 20 Years

20 years ago I woke up and had the thought, "You know what Wendy? You're not nearly narcissistic enough.  You should totally start a blog!"  It was February 2003. I had just had my 4th anniversary of being a professional librarian. Coincidentally I had also been reviewing at The Romance Reader for 4 years. There was a respectable handful of romance novel web sites (All About Romance and Mrs. Giggles are still standing!) and no social media. Laurie Gold (founder of AAR) and Rosario (a reader living in Uruguay at the time) had blogs. Now I had one. Three of us. When I started this blog Blogger hadn't been bought out by Google yet, there was no commenting feature and what are these tags you speak of? It was very rudimentary but it's what we had.  

We soldiered on, throwing our words out into the Interwebs Wilderness and then...2005 happened. Suddenly it was a riotous explosion of blogs. Not a day goes by where I don't miss all those quirky, fun individual blogs that sprouted up during that time. Group blogs arrived and I wrote for many of them. By my count I've helped kill off at least three (Romancing the Blog, Reader's Gab, and Heroes & Heartbreakers).

I have seen things. I've lived the life cycle of romance reviewers being mean girls, then bloggers being mean girls, to somehow having the tide turn enough that I got a big shiny Librarian of the Year award from Romance Writers of America. This was during a period when my work life was not fantastic for various reasons. It's a marvel I never did put that plaque on a big ol' rope chain and rock it around the office. 

I've seen all the Drama Llama, some of it 3-4 times (there's very few new kerfuffles y'all).  I've watched self-publishing go from Crazy Guy printing his manifesto in his garage, to viable career option for writers. I remember when eBooks weren't "real books." I remember when I thought y'all would pry print out of my cold dead hands (I can't remember the last book I read that wasn't in a digital format...).  I remember listening to audiobooks on cassette and all y'all thinking I was completely insane because "why would you want to listen to a book?!"

So much has changed.  And yet, so much hasn't. 

For one thing, I'm still naïve enough to think that if more people read genre fiction the world would be a better place. For another, Romancelandia is still a pretty rad place even with the squabbles that sometimes have my eyes rolling back in my head. And while I sit in my rocking chair, cradling my adult beverage and non-illustrated clinch book covers, I marvel at these young whippersnappers with their BookTok and BookTube and Bookstagram and podcasts and what-not. I've seen the diversity of the genre and the voices supporting it grow. 

I've been ignoring the blogs are dead talk for at least a decade, mainly because I'm stubborn and the older I get the more I find social media problematic for a lot of reasons. I've seen this blog start with a readership of my Mom, to a whole bunch of people, to now a small group of loyalists who still regularly turn up and leave me comments now and then. 

I was a 20-something, still very green librarian when I started this blog. Now I'm living on the other side of the country and oversee a division of roughly 60 people. I feel like I've lived 10 lifetimes in just the past 3 years - and that's just on the work front. There have been many, many days where I've thought about putting this blog in mothballs. I'm older, I'm tired pretty much all the time, and my work is demanding. But, not to put too fine a point on it, I love this blog. I can't begin to tell you all the good it's brought to my life. A community. Friends. Yes, even accolades. 

I love this blog. I love reading. I love all of you. Thank you for reading this blog - whether it's been for a month or the past 20 years.