Well! 2019 promises to be a year of great change for me personally – my husband graduated from college in December, and went full time at his job at the beginning of the year. (Computer Science.) In April we’re planning to start the process to buy a house! So very soon, we’ll be moving, and we won’t have roommates anymore. (OH THANK HEAVENS.) With that in mind, I’m toning down my Goodreads goal slightly to 150 books this year, since the move will take a lot of my reading time. (And we have a two-week vacation planned later in the year.)

As for reading challenges, I’d like to do the 50 books in 50 states challenge, with a small twist – no straight white men. So a book set in each state of the US, while avoiding white male authors. (I made it straight white because there’s a few states – like Vermont – that it might be pretty difficult to find a non-white author in, but I should be able to find a queer white author writing there. I will be doing my best to avoid white authors entirely, though.)

My library is doing a reading challenge, but it’s only one challenge each month so that shouldn’t be hard to keep up with, and they’re all pretty easy tasks. For example, January is “Read A Book You’ve Been Meaning To Read” which is pretty much everything on my desk!

I’m planning to start the Dewey Decimal Challenge, but I’m not putting a time restraint on it. The Dewey Decimal Challenge is read a book for each category of the system – so each 10s place, I believe. I’ll make a page in the sidebar to keep track of it. I also need to make a page for the 50 states challenge and a page to keep track of my books about and by autistic people. I’m also planning to make a page to gather links to Chronic Illness books and posts. I could make a page for LGBT content, but that would be 75% of the fiction I read! I think using the tag is the better idea for that.

For the blog, I’m going to continue to try to post every day. I’d really like to get a short fiction series going on Sundays, I’m just having trouble writing the beginning of the story. I’d like to post more regularly on Instagram and Litsy, as well, I just keep forgetting about them! Lately I’ve been most active on Twitter. The Facebook mobile app changed and it’s a lot harder to post to my Facebook page from my phone, so that has just been getting the automated posts whenever I post here on the blog.

December was my best month ever, in raw views, and each month this last year was better than the last, except for the spike I had in July and August. I assume that’s related to people wasting time on the internet during the summer. I beat both summer months in December, though, so hopefully the growth will continue building! Maybe I’ll host a giveaway when I hit 1000 views in one month or something.

In more personal hopes for this year, my husband going full-time at his job means our insurance is changing and so is my doctor, which is actually a good thing. I’m going to be looking into a functional doctor (there’s a few in my area) who will be more willing to try other drugs for my thyroid and autoimmune disorders. I’d really like to kick these constant fatigue, insomnia, and digestive issues.

I’m also really looking forward to our wedding anniversary this year, we’re planning a trip to Toronto in early July to celebrate! I might simply take a short hiatus from the blog over those two weeks, if I don’t have enough of a backlog of entries built up. I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.

So those are my plans for this year. On Tuesday I’ll be talking about some of my most anticipated releases this year, so stay tuned!