Hey all, Sam here.
Happy New Year! Well, at least I hope it is a happy new year. I definitely had to prep this post up in advance because this is the busiest time of the year for my job and I didn’t know if I would have the time to get anything written if I waited until the day of to finish prepping my posts.
Anyway, each year I have started to give myself general goals for the year. Trying to set things up and call them resolutions always makes them feel like a chore and I give up on them after just a few weeks, so I’ve just referred to them as goals and it seems to work out a bit better. But last year I not only had my usual goals for the year, but I also added in a “Word of the Year”, and I thought that was pretty cool, so I’m going to start today’s post by talking about the word I’ve chosen for 2025.
Last year, my word of the year was “self-care” and most of the year I feel like that was a word I could aspire to…although November-December there was so much going on that I could not give myself the space and care I probably should have, which was frustrating, but hey, overall I think having a word of the year was a nice idea. I was a bit gentler on myself when I wasn’t keeping up with my personal goals to my personal idea of where I should be in my progress. I still could stand to be a little more gracious with myself on that though. I still feel like I fell very short of my potential based on other years.
For 2025, I think my word of the year is…”creative.”
I want to work on creating more. I have a couple in-progress projects and I have a few other ideas I’d like to try out, so I need to figure out a better path forward so I can carve out time to work on taking my ideas and putting them onto the page or into a physical format.
Anyway, let’s go over the general goals I have for 2025.
Reading
I completed my reading goal for 2024, but unlike previous years, I didn’t have to adjust my goal because I reached the finish line halfway through the year. My goal was 100 books and I ended the year with 125 books read.
There are so many books that I own and want to read, and I already know of so many incredible sounding books that are coming out in 2025, so I am hopeful that I can break out of my seemingly persistent reading slump and read a bunch this year.
As with every year, I’m setting my initial goal at 100 books. We’ll see what happens from there. It would be lovely to get back up to 200+ books read in a year, but considering some of my other plans for 2025, that might not happen.
Blogging
I need to get better at blogging more consistently again. Surprisingly this blog is still getting fairly steady views, even when I go weeks without a post. I think my goal is going to be two posts minimum each week. I don’t know what posts those are going to be, but I want to release two posts each week at the very least.
Weekend Writer might be showing up, because I’m trying to focus on being creative this year, and part of that means working on my creative writing. Manga Monday may pop up every now and again because there’s still a lot of volumes I need to read. Of course there’s a chance that Tabletop Tuesday will make random appearances. David and I have two D&D groups currently, plus a whole bunch of board games we want to play and talk about. And finally, of course I hope and plan to have more book reviews written and posted. My NetGalley review percentage is practically begging me to talk more about books.
Writing
I am currently in the middle of two projects: a novel and a novella.
The novella is actually an expansion into my D&D character’s backstory and writing it has really helped me figure out the character, but I think it’s an interesting story even without the context of D&D, so when I finish all of it, I might see about tidying it up and releasing it.
The novel is the one I’ve been trying to get written for many years now. It’s a D&D romance heavily inspired by the real life story of how my husband and I met and fell in love. The story follows both the out-of-game developing relationship and romance as well as the in-game fantasy adventure. So far it has been really fun to write, but my focus hasn’t been too great and I keep setting it aside.
This year I really want to focus on my writing more. I’m tired of pushing myself into the category of “someday author” again and again.
Conventions/Trips
We can’t afford that many conventions and trips anymore, so we have to be a little selective, but we do have a few things planned. We have a long weekend trip to Ohio to visit my mom scheduled for early May (and we’ll be taking David on his first trip to Kelley’s Island on Lake Erie, so that’ll be fun).
We obviously plan on attending Gen Con again this year in August. I’ve already purchased our tickets to the Critical Role live show taking place that same weekend.
Other than that, I’m really hoping to visit Mark Twain’s Boyhood home in Hannibal, Missouri, and then also go to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s historic home and museum in Mansfield, Missouri. The fact that I live within 5-6 hours of the homes of a couple authors I enjoyed in my childhood is really cool, and after all of our travel across the country for our previous job, it really feels like a nothing trip.
Obviously Mark Twain’s will be a little easier (it’s only an hour and a half away), so we won’t even need an overnight for that. But to go to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s home, we’ll probably make it a weekend trip that might also include a stopover in St. Louis.
We don’t really have any other trips planned than that (oh, other than hopefully returning to Ohio for at least one weekend of the Ohio Renaissance Festival), but something might pop up as we get deeper into 2025.
All right, well that is all from me for today. I should have my Top Reads of 2024 post coming soon, as well as some more book reviews and such. Thank you so much for stopping by, and I’ll be back soon with more geeky content.
Free State of Geek 