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2020: Goals, Plans, Reading Challenges

Hello Travelers!

After nearly six months hiatus, I'm back for a new year. Now, with some changes. First of all, obviously, the name change. This is to coincide with the creation of a YouTube Channel with the same name that my husband and I will be doing together. The second change is we're going to expand our scope to include music, movies, and some creative writing. The goal is to do at least one video and one blog post each week. There may also be an Instagram account but I haven't finalized that just yet so I'll keep you updated.Finally, I plan on being a little more experimental this year with what I do, starting with a different kind of reading challenge.

Let's start with my plans and goals for the new year.

As i said, I'm teaming up with my husband to make a YouTube channel. it's going to be a combination of BookTube, AuthorTube, and a little mix of music and movie discussion and critic thrown in every once in a while.

For writing, my goal is to get a YA fantasy I've been working on for a while polished up and maybe ready to start submitting next year. I also want to do both of the Camp NaNoWrimos and NaNoWriMo itself, hopefully creating the first draft for one new story, an NA Urban Supernatural Fantasy, and finishing up a few previous projects that I need to work on. I'm trying to be more deliberate and organized with my writing this year, which means experimenting with more plotting and outlining methods and trying to create a routine that I can stick to and actually be productive (curse you YouTube rabbit holes!).

As for reading and reviews, I only want to aim for fifty books this year. To accomplish this, I have two reading challenges that I am going to do.

Color in My Shelves Challenge:
Inspired by the reading challenges of Holly Hearts Books over on Youtube, the goal of this challenge is to read the books on your shelves. I have turned all of the books that I have not read or have not finished reading around so I can't see the spine. As I complete each book, I will turn them back to the spines can "color" my shelves. I'm adding a little insentive for myself. I am not allowed to get any more new books until I have completed at least one shelf. Hopefully, this will help me save money and get me to actually start and finish the books that I have purchased. Of course, I still don't have all of my books with me, so there are a few that I won't be able to include in this challenge, but I have my hands full already.

Read Through the Decades Challenge:
The second challenge i'll be doing is inspired by this year's calendars from Half Priced Books. Every year, they create a new calendar that follows some kind of theme. This year, each month is representative of a different decade starting at 1900 and ending with the 2010s. This calendar also lists some books, music, and movies that came out during each of those decades. I decided to challenge myself to read the books listed for each decade each month for the rest of the year. Some of them, I've read before while others i've never heard of. It's a bit of an experiment and seems like a good place to start this blog an channel. If you're interested in following along, I'll be making a series of posts describing each of the books I'll be reading. It's sort of like a TBR but I'm giving myself some flexability with my first challenge so it doesn't get too dull.

As for the other two elements of this channel/blog, I'm not sure what we'll do for the music and movies. I might tweak some of the booktube tags to fit music and movies or we might try a "watching" challenge at some point.

This year is going to be a bit of trial and error. I hope you will join us on this journey and maybe pick up a book or two from the decade challenge. We look forward to seeing and hearing from all of you as we set out on this adventure.

Safe journeys!

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