2018 Bookish Goals

It's...almost 2018?? I wish I could say it felt like 2017 went by really fast, but boy oh boy, it did not. 2017 was honestly probably the worst year of my life, minus reconnecting with my boyfriend and graduating with my master's degree in library science. This year was just such a mess, and I was a mess, and the whole damn world was a mess, mess, mess. And not even a hot mess: an ugly, horrifying, dreadful mess that I really wish I could mostly erase from my memory.

Aaaaaaanyway...bright side, it's almost over! I never used to be the kind of person who reflected a lot at the end of the year or made goals for the next year, but I did it last year and it was kind of fun and motivational, at least for the first few months of the year. Plus, I've been seeing all my favorite cool people on Book Twitter post about their writing and book-related goals for the past couple weeks and I feel left out and want to post my own! So here are some of the writing and reading goals I have for 2018:

1. Read 55 books. In 2017, my original goal was to read 75 books, but halfway through the year, I realized that was not going to happen, so I changed my goal. This is okay; it's important to take stock of what you can really do and adjust as you go along, which is something I've been working on getting better at this year. I ended up reading mostly good books, and I think I read a lot more for quality versus quantity like I usually do because of this goal, and it improved the quality of the books I read for the most part. So, for next year, I want to keep my goal small but also add a little to my goal from this year, so 55 books it is!

2. Read 1 poetry collection per month. I got really into poetry this year because it's the only genre my boyfriend and I can agree on (he likes literary fiction and I am staunchly into YA), but I realized I really enjoy reading poetry for fun! For 2018, I want to expose myself more to the genre and continue reading some great poetry.

3. Finish the MS I started for NaNoWriMo. I got about 27,000 words into a very dark and depressing contemporary LGBTQ+ novel for NaNo this year before realizing it wanted to be a fluffy romance. With that in mind, I want to redraft my sweet, bookish, queer, anxious novel in 2018.

4. Participate in #PitMad. I have always wanted to participate in #PitMad, but have yet to finish a draft, much less edit and revise in time for one of the events, so that is my goal for this year. Even if I do the one in December, I will consider that a win.

5. Write more poetry. I started writing poetry again this past year, which is something I haven't done since high school but love to do just as much as I did then. I even started a poetry instagram account, but eventually I stopped writing poetry as much so I didn't post and it kind of died. I would like to revive it, since the need to post more frequently would encourage me to write poetry more. Hopefully the combo of wanting to reinstate my poetrygram and reading at least one poetry collection per month will keep me motivated to experiment more with poetry writing!

6. Read more MG. This is an important goal for me professionally because I hope to be a teen/YA librarian soon. The ages of teen/YA can vary depending on library, from grades 6-12 or 7-12, so I feel like I need to read more books on the younger side of things to keep up. Plus, most library jobs for youth are just "youth services," which includes ages 0-18, so I should keep up with all the lit for those ages if I want to have a career in that sector of library services.