Hello all, and welcome to my first blog post of the new year! We are now nearly a week into 2021 and, unsurprisingly, it mostly just feels like more of the same. I don’t really DO New Year’s resolutions, per se, but I do have a few goals in mind, most of them book-related, of course!

I first wanted to share my overall reading progress for 2020! I had a goal to read 50 books in the year. I didn’t quite make it, but I read 46 which is still very good (for me at least! I have a friend who routinely reads between 175-200 every single year, but we won’t go there…) I keep a log of my total reading hours in my bullet journal, color-coded for format (print, audiobook, ebook, comic/graphic novel, and fanfiction). My total reading hours was 458 hrs, which is approximately 19 days! My highest total hours per format was, unsurprisingly, audiobook at 294 hours. Most of my reading is done by audiobook these days — and for the record, I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with this, or that it is substantively different from print reading in any way! Still, I am hoping to work a bit more print-reading into my schedule this year. I think I’ve mentioned this on the blog before, but I USED to read voraciously, and severe depression killed my ability to read for nearly a decade. Audiobooks saved my life, but I am hoping to work my way back up to something at least resembling my old reading habit. It’s slow progress, but it is progress…

For 2021, my goal is once again to read 50 books. And 30 of those will, of course, be for the reading challenge I set up for myself: Amanda’s Very Idiosyncratic 2021 Reading Challenge.

I am also going to continue on with the “Finish the Series” Reading Challenge I joined last year. For last year I finished three series that I had previously started: the Artemis Fowl series, the Old Kingdom Series, and the Wayward Children series (at least until the new one comes out later this month!)

For this year, I am going to try to finish the Percy Jackson series, which I started last year (so this year it counts as “previously-started”!), and possibly the Redwall series. I want to do a massive Redwall re-read, and I own and read MOST of the series — having read them all during the HEIGHT of my reading days in high school and the first couple years of college — but as I got more and more busy with college and part-time jobs, I lost track and never finished the last five books in the series: High Rhulain, Eulalia!, Doomwyte, The Sable Quean, The Rogue Crew. I could, of course, just read those five and have done with it. But I think it would be fun, if a tad ambitious, to try to do a re-read of the whole series from the beginning (and yes, I prefer to read in publication order, don’t @ me).

I also intend to continue trucking along on my way through the Dresden Files books, though I have little illusion of finishing the whole series this year… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I also have several writing goals, of course. Last year I continued work on one novel, and started a second, while also tinkering with planning/outlining for a novella and (possibly) a screenplay. I participated in both Camp Nanos in April and July, and actual Nano in November, though I didn’t “win” them. All told, between all projects (and the blog) I wrote 123,132 words! I would like to have a similar total word count for 2021, and better if possible. I am hoping to finish the one novel (Holes in Your Coffin) and make significant progress on the second (Onyx Seal), and I would REALLY like to have one short story or novella done. I am INFAMOUSLY bad at writing SHORT and CONCISE, but I think it would be good practice for me, and might also give me a (albeit very small) chance to maybe get something published while I continue to try to finish a whole novel. But who knows…

I have other goals as well, of course: saving money, continuing to improve my exercise routine, that sort of stuff, but that’s boring so we won’t get into that here.

I’d love to hear about your goals for 2021! Books to read, things to write or make or do! Please share in the comments!