WITMonth Day 31 | Another year past

This post may be a bit more... personal than most.

August 31st always seems to sneak up on me. Wasn't there so much more I wanted to do? Weren't there more posts and issues I promised to write about?

This year, there absolutely were. There were a lot of subjects I left dangling and promised to return to. And I will! But I also took a few days off from blogging these past few days after  the intense compilation of the 100 Best Books by Women in Translation (100 Best WIT), what has quickly become the most popular post on the blog of all time (...by far...) and has comfortably passed the 5000 direct hits milestone. The project was extraordinarily rewarding and I am proud of the work I did to help compile the final list, but it was also very draining. I also won't pretend that it hasn't cast my own role in WITMonth in a new light - am I really that necessary as an individual?

I've promised a lot more blog posts and I will complete them. The analysis of the Hebrew-language publishing market is forthcoming, as are many more posts on the 100 Best WIT. There's so much I want to discuss, from the process of compiling the list, the ways in which its biases emerged early in the compilation, the contemporary tilt, and the degree to which I struggle with the inevitable imperfections of a crowd-sourced list. I also want to share the full list of nominations, but that will require a lot of work - I was not so organized while compiling the data and it's possible that there are errors or duplicates along the way, some which may even impact the top 100 themselves. Human error feels like an inevitable outcome here, and I will need to spend a lot of time/effort ensuring that the full list is accurate. (Not to mention, I didn't record a lot of metadata like country of origin, language of origin, or even proper spelling for most of the authors...)

There's a lot I plan to do on the blog, but I'm also going to begin to ease my foot off the gas. I adore this project and I am extremely proud of everything I've done since late 2013 and I have every intention of continuing to work on the @read_WIT Twitter and @readwit Instagram and posting and organizing and so on. But I'm not sure I'll be doing as much. I think the era of daily WITMonth posts is over, as is the urgent need to reblog/respond to all Twitter posts in the tag. The joy of having a project grow so much is that... I can't actually keep up with everything! And so I'm not going to. At the end of the day, I do this project on a purely voluntary basis, I do it with nothing in exchange (except the rare review copy, and I do mean rare), and I'm doing it alongside full time work/school. (Yay PhD life!) I want to be able to continue to enjoy this project without completely burning out. So things are going to have to change.

I love seeing how WITMonth has grown. I love seeing how WITMonth is constantly changing. I love every single blogger, Instagrammer, Booktuber, critic, publisher, translator, or whatever who takes part in WITMonth, who creates new avenues for promoting women writers in translation, who takes steps to move our cause forward. I am grateful to all of you and all of the work you all do. Another year has passed us by, and as always, from the bottom of my heart: Thank you.