Well, I am, officially, already behind schedule for my 2019 reading challenges. You may recall that the goal for my main challenge was to check off one category each week. You may also be advanced enough in your math skills to understand that if my overall goal is to read 75 books in the year (applying 67 of them to different challenge categories), then I need to be reading at a pace that is more than one book per week.
And yet here I am continuing my long march through book #1.
Anyone who knows me knows that I am a clutter-hound, and that I am kind-of-perpetually trying to figure out how to get that part of my life and our house under control. (Just look at the whole Stuff about Stuff category here on JALC for a few snapshots on this theme…)
So I’ve been vaguely intrigued by the various chatter I’ve been seeing about Marie Kondo‘s new Netflix series.
I haven’t watched this show yet, in large part because I have absolutely been minimizing my TV time in order to keep a priority on my 2019 reading and writing pursuits.
Full disclosure: I’m very much on the fence as to whether I will ever watch it.
I have got to find some easy way to choose things to write about. Right now, my only focus for making 2019 the year of WRITE is to keep the daily discipline of showing up at the page*–just showing up and writing is, I’m guessing, going to be the only goal I have for myself during the rest of January. And maybe for longer.
So if just showing up at the page is my goal, then I would very much prefer to lessen the time spent on the “what the hell shall I write about tonight?” stage of the process.
Seriously, y’all. I have spent nigh unto an hour gaming and wasting time on the iPad whilst this went on in the endless internal loop:
I need to go start writing, but what the heck am I gonna write about tonight? I’m wasting time trying to figure this out, cos I need to go start writing. But what the heck am I gonna write about!?!
Well, maybe those “hecks” were actually “fucks.” But it’s a decently accurate transcription…
I’m aware that there’s a certain–irony?–to having made this new pledge to do more writing and then to follow up by writing solely about my reading schedule for the year. I know: that isn’t actually ironic at all, unless you mean “ironic” as in the old Alanis song. Let’s just call it “slightly counter-intuitive.”
And I get that. I’ve tried (and failed) to work my way through Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way multiple times, but I still remember her counsel about putting yourself on a “reading fast.”
So yesterday, I posted the categories and my choices for what I’m calling my “primary reading challenge.” I also mentioned that I was actually doing multiple challenges and would do a follow-up post on that today.
I was tempted to use a Who-What-Where-Why-When-How organization for this post, but actually 3 of those questions are self-evident, and the fourth is pretty darn easy to answer as well.
Who? Me. When? 2019. Where? Wherever I happen to be.
What? In addition to my main challenge categories, I’ll be reading books to cover the categories in the 2019 PopSugar and Book Riot Read Harder challenges.
See how easy that was?
One of the small markers I’ve been watching as a sign of my life getting better over the past few years is the re-establishment of my reading habits. The advent of my Goodreads use overlaps with this improvement curve to tell a pretty dramatic tale: in 2015, I read 7 books; in 2016, I read 23. The floodgates opened in 2017 for a total of 83, and then in 2018, I hit the round number of reading 100 books.
I’m guessing the time I’m going to be allocating each day to generating words might very well cut into this year’s consumption of text. As such, I’ve set myself a relatively non-ambitious goal of reading 75 books in 2019. The slightly more ambitious piece of that is how I’m using the structure of reading challenges to continue diversifying what and who I read.
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