What's Up With The Mayhem? by Michael Gettel-Gilmartin

Hi folks! Here's hoping you've all been having a great summer, full of adventures and activities, and just plain fun with families and friends. Summer always seems to whizz by, doesn't it?

Here at Project Middle Grade Mayhem we've been doing some summer-inspired soul-searching. When we look back at the past eight years--yes, we've been bringing you the very best of middle-grade for eight, wonderful years!--we see over 1000 blog posts, myriad page views and comments, and an ever-evolving gang of some of the best middle grade writers on the planet.

But we've also noticed a trend. Plainly speaking, blog reading is down. As more short-forms of social media have evolved (think Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and all the rest), people have even less time to interact with long-form blogging. I mean, who among us really wants to stare at a screen all day?

As writers, it's always a struggle keeping up the social connectivity and working on promotion of our work, and doing what we all love doing best: immersing ourselves in the worlds of our stories. More and more of us feel the tug to take a break from social media, and reconnect with our own creativity. (One of our founding members, Caroline Starr Rose, has written persuasively about this on the blog: Deep Work and a Digital Declutter.)

So basically, we've come to a crossroads, and our membership has decided it's time to put our blog to bed. That's not to say you'll never hear from us again. Our plan is to migrate to Facebook, where we will be setting up a group page where conversations can continue and mayhem can flourish. In essence, we'll be growing our Project Middle Grade Mayhem family as we invite you to share your thoughts, promote your books, and celebrate all the wonderful things about middle grade fiction and nonfiction.

So please stay tuned for things to change in September--and thank you all for your support during these eight magnificent mayhem-filled years. May the Mayhem be with you!