Goodbye … and hello

This goodbye to emilybooks will not be much of a surprise, given that my last post was back in – help! – August. But, however inevitable, goodbyes can be hard.

Parents, of course, feel this especially keenly. Today was the first day of 2019 that Ezra didn’t burst into tears when I dropped him at nursery. I suspect he thinks the new 2+ room is too strange and different, in spite of all the dinosaurs and glitter etc. He also feels rather ambivalent towards his new key worker. So I often try to practice the ‘goodbye moment’ en route:

‘Let’s say goodbye Mama, goodbye Vita, and hello Debbie, hello Michaela, hello Leila, hello Cici, hello William…’ I wave at him, a little manically, looking at his reflection in the mirror, while I’m driving.

Ezra looks back at me, stonyfaced. ‘No.’

I try again. Vita helps.

He pouts, pathetically sweetly. ‘No. No bye mama.’

In fact, whenever I even say the word ‘nursery’ to him, he just glares at me and sullenly says: ‘No bye mama.’

Goodbyes suck, it’s true. But, as I try to explain to Ez, if we never say goodbye, then we can never say hello again. And a big hello at the end of the day is so wildly brilliant, it’s got to be worth it, right?

So, while I feel extremely sad to say goodbye to Emilybooks, and to all you lovely readers and commenters and kind people who have shown such a thoughtful interest in my life and my books, I am happy indeed to say HELLO to my new website:

Emily Rhodes Writer

Yeah it’s no blog, but it clearly shows the writing that I’m doing elsewhere – I intend to keep the reviews and features pages neurotically up-to-date. And it looks so smart!

Walking book clubbers will see there’s a snazzy new page with all the latest on there too, and it is easy to sign up to the newsletter.

And you will see there’s a selection of some favourite old blog posts there too.

I hope you like it! Please let me know any feedback…

Finally, I have just this week ventured into the world of instagram. Or #bookstagram, or whatever the correct term is. I hope it might work like a mini blog for me, with very amateur photos of book stuff (The husband, scrolling through my phone photos the other day: ‘Is that your first instagram photo? You need to get some professional advice…) and probably far-too-long comments, also about book stuff, without the right hashtags in. So if you are on there, please say hi. I’m: @emilyrhodeswriter.

Thanks so much for your support over the eight years of Emilybooks. Goodbye, and I hope we say hello again soon, somewhere else.

Emily