 Hi everyone, welcome or welcome back to my channel. It has been a while since I last filmed, for various reasons. We last spoke in April and it is now January 2024. I have been wanting to come back to booktube and chat to you guys about books for a little while but it didn't feel right to just launch into everything and not say hi first and chat about where I've been and what's been going on with you guys of course. I really hope that you're all doing well. I hope that 2023 treated you as kindly as possible. I know it was an awful year and really difficult for so many people in so many different ways and that is still ongoing so I'm sending out all of my love and well wishes to you. So relating to what has been going on with me, last summer I experienced a very close bereavement. My dad unexpectedly passed away. I'm not going to go into specifics here. I don't really know what I want to say and not say but basically that turned my life completely upside down for a while. Me and Cameron, my husband, weren't in our house for quite a while. We spent a lot of time up in the Lake District with my mum and sister. Obviously this is all still very much ongoing for me though it looks a little different now than what it did a few months ago. Just before that in the spring I also actually left my full-time job as an editor at a publishing house to become a full-time freelance editor. For those of you who may not know about my job, I started a career in publishing five years ago. I became a junior editor at a children's publishing house. I then worked my way up through various editorial positions. Due to many different factors, the timing became right last year for me to leave my full-time position and go fully freelance. I am so pleased that I made that decision. It was 100% the right decision though scary. It has been going even better than I could have hoped. I'm working on a really cool range of projects with really cool publishing houses across both kids and adults. I'm loving it. There are so many aspects of it that are so freeing and exciting and challenging. If anyone is really interested in my career and what it's like to be an editor, specifically a freelance editor, I could potentially make some videos on that at some point. All this is to say that that was another huge life change for me last year. It required a lot of energy and attention. It was a massive adjustment and then of course experiencing the bereavement in summer while having recently transitioned to being self-employed threw up its own challenges in itself. I am feeling more settled now than I was at different points last year. I'm feeling a bit steadier and more stable in myself and I just feel so lucky and grateful to be doing this job that I love and that I find value and fulfilment in. So while all this was going on, I did manage to keep up my reading in 2023, though I ultimately read less than I have done in previous years. In the immediate aftermath of my dad dying, I found that I couldn't really read new books, I couldn't focus on them properly or take them in, but I still really wanted to be reading so I found a lot of solace in rereading some of my favourite books. It's amazing what a favourite story can do for you. It feels like the right time now for me to come back and to chat about books with you all again. I've really missed it and I really want to be connected to this community again. I don't know how consistent my uploading is going to be, I just know that I want this to be part of my life again, however consistent or inconsistent that may prove to be. I've got some fun videos to film soon, including a video talking about everything I've read since last April. Pray for me. I will also of course be filming a best books of 2023 video and perhaps those books may come as more of a surprise than in previous years, which may be nice. If there's anything else you guys want to see in a video, please do let me know down below in the comments, I will see what I can do. I am more than up for suggestions and going with the flow and seeing how this all goes. I think that's enough of an update for today. Thank you so much to everyone who has watched this video, if it's the first video of mine you've seen or if you've been watching for a while. I really, really appreciate it. I'm really looking forward to hearing from you if you'd like to say hi down below. Please tell me how you've been, how was your 2023, what have you been reading, whatever you would like to share, I would genuinely like to hear. Thank you all and I will hopefully see you all very soon in a new video. Bye.