Upcoming Reviews and Motivation Struggles

As I write this post, I am most of the way through reading Scholastic's Wildfire teen romance series.  I am now past #70, and the set contains 82 books.  I have experienced mental fatigue since around #60.  The later books have generally vapid content, with obnoxious titles and cover photos.  I have had to skip around half of the books between #60 and #70.  I will have to keep skipping books in order to get through the set.  It's either that or quit altogether.

It's interesting how this problem seems to be typical of most all lengthy series.

If I can make it through the rest of the Wildfire set, then I will commence with reading the Sweet Dreams teen romance series.  That is the plan, but I don't know how far I will get.  I may read some Sweet Dreams books and then have to take a break.  Unfortunately, my breaks can end up taking a year or two.  Therefore, I will try to keep going, but I cannot make any promises.

I am obviously quite far behind in publishing blog reviews as compared to my current reading.  In the last two months, I actually forgot several times to set the next Judy Bolton post for publication.  I also didn't feel like doing it on other occasions and decided to set the posts far enough apart so that I wouldn't have to do anything.

I have had a particularly stressful school year due to a textbook adoption that didn't go well.  The stress has really caught up with me, so I am running on fumes for these last six weeks of school.

I mention this so that you know why I lose motivation.  I am still motivated just enough to keep writing reviews, but that motivation has decreased substantially.

It also doesn't help that the series book community is quite fractured.  We no longer have the great discussions that we had in the Yahoo! groups 15 years ago.  I really expected a better response to my Judy Bolton reviews.  I certainly could have posted links to every post in the Facebook groups, but I didn't feel like it.  Besides, I did post links to my Kay Tracey reviews in one group.  Even so, I didn't get much response to those, either.  So why bother?

I do know that at least several dozen people greatly appreciate my reviews.  I just wish that my reviews resulted in more interaction than just one or two people making short comments.  Quite often, the reviews receive no comments.

After the next two or three years, I likely will not continue to write reviews.  I figure by then that I will run out of new series books to read.  Once I begin revisiting books that I have already reviewed, I will not bother to write anything.  For now, I'll keep going, but I am getting tired of it.

In closing, I want to mention how important it is to take the time to react to people's posts on Facebook.  I don't react to most people's posts, so I'm as guilty as anyone else.  However, I now make a point to react when certain people post.  These are people who tend to get ignored, and it's a shame.  For instance, posts about very obscure series get ignored, so I make sure to react to those posts.  I want those people to know that their contributions are appreciated.