2020-2021 Eeveeyear Reading and Writing Goals

Here at Mint and Brambles, the beginning of October is the "new year" for my annual reading and writing goals, because I am still very tied to the academic year, but I'm also a bit of a disaster. It also gives me a month's lead time before NanoWrimo to figure out what I'm doing for that. Writing 50,000 words in 30 days is not a thing I can do, but I like to do something. 

Last year, our goals were to write 20,000 words of fiction and 250 handwritten pages of whatever, read 100 books, get two short stories done and ready to submit for publication, and spend 1000 hours writing and 1200 hours reading. I...achieved none of those goals. Well, I might have hit the time goals, but we'll never know, because I stopped having a working phone in December, and due to a combination of global pandemic and me being a disaster,  that situation still hasn't been rectified, and none of the tech I'm using to fill in the gaps can run my time tracking app. I managed to read 74 books, write 14731 words of fiction, and do 191 handwritten pages. I didn't work on short fiction at all. Looking over my progress bars, I'm mostly struck by how close together they are. I did try to keep things in balance, catch up where I was behind, but there were times during this year when it was wildly mismatched. In particular, one handwritten page in my current notebook can run to over 200 words, so doing on of those adds a lot more to my word count than it does to my page count. Getting into a rhythm with the Dresden Files reread over the summer helped a lot with catching my page count up. I still can't decide if the phone situation helped or hurt how many books I managed to read. Normally, I'm a book audiobook reader, and the interim "phone" doesn't run audible, but it does run Nook and Libby. I read faster with my eyeballs, but time I spend playing phone games is no longer really able to double as reading time. Other complications include the fact that a lot of my audiobooking is rereading, and that I do spend less time playing phone games now that I don't have access to MergeDragons. 

I do regret the loss of time tracking, because a lot of my reading this year was really long game manuals and a couple of thick, dense academic books, and without that, I don't have any way to account for how much more time and work that was compared to, say, reading the latest October Daye book. Since I still don't have a working phone, I'm going to incorporate a page count reading goal for the coming year. Page counts are easy enough to look up, so I should be able to do this for ebooks and audiobooks as well as physical books. I also stand by leaving rereads out of my book count, but reading some books over and over is part of my writing process, and this is a writing blog, so I'll be adding a separate goal for a certain amount of rereading. 

Reading, writing, and page count goals are all returning, updated to 150% of what I actually accomplished this year. This puts all of our goals somewhat higher than last year, which is gonna be interesting given that I didn't reach last year's goals in the first place. It's good to reach a little. I was having issues actually doing blog posts since they "only" help the page count, so this year we're gonna have a goal for blog posts as well. 

Reading Goals

• Read 111 Books
• Reread 80 Books
• Read 38150 Pages (includes audiobooks, does not include rereads). 

Writing Goals

• Write 286 Handwritten Pages
• Write 22096 Words of Fiction
• Write 75 Blog Posts

I don't know how close I'll come to reaching any of these, especially the new objectives. One of the things this blog is about is learning in public. Please join me in the coming year as I attempt to be gay, do crimes, and read ALL the things.