Mid-month Blogathon Challenge

I’m sure I’ve said this umpteen times, but I really do want to get back into blogging more regularly.  So, I’ve decided to set myself a blogathon / blopomo challenge: posting every day for a month from today, June 15th.

I don’t think I’m going to have a theme, though if I do start to get stuck I might try the alphabet meme thing.  That worked pretty well for me before.  It’s probably going to be general rambling and catching up on what’s going on in my life, though.  Exciting stuff!  Or, you know, not.

As a reminder to myself in case I’m in need of inspiration, I’m going to try to write about

  • What I’ve been up to over the last few months
  • Mental health stuff (which kind of ties in with the above, tbh)
  • My favourite niece, Miss RA
  • Merlin McPurrlin (cat spam, here we come)
  • Knittin’ and Spinnin’
  • What I’ve been fangirling over
  • And my forays into learning to be a bit of a girly girl.  Sometimes.

Alrighty, first post accomplished!  I have some partners in ‘thoning crime, gathered via my Plurk flist. So, hi Che Rex, Char (also on deviantart), dangerouslycrafty and captainstardust.  Feel free to prod me if I forget to post!

Reading Challenges

As I’ve mentioned before, I read a lot.  I always thought there wasn’t much point in me doing a reading challenge like the 52 books in a year one, since I habitually read much more than a book a week anyway.  However, on the Goodreads site, I came across the Seasonal Reading Challenge group, which posts a long list of tasks to be achieved over a season (defined as a three month period).  So I signed up.  Because while I read a lot, I only really read within a couple of genres (Sci fi / Fantasy / Urban Fantasy / SFR, and Historical Romance – I like my escapism, see!).  I used to read mystery / spy / thriller novels more when I was younger, but I moved away from them when I got more into reading sci-fi.  Anyway, as I think I also mentioned in a previous post, doing that challenge didn’t widen my reading as much as I’d hoped / planned.  It probably would have done if I didn’t have such a long list of books I already want to read.

So, last year I did the 144-books-in-a-year challenge instead.  And… I failed!!  I only read around 110 books.  Some of them were pretty doorstep-y, but still.  I spose that’s what happens when you only have one pair of hands – I can’t read and knit or spin at the same time, unless I’m listening to an audiobook.  Which I don’t do very often.

This year, the challenge group (this is also on Goodreads, by the way) has changed its parameters so that you can set your own goals to some extent.  I thought I’d be realistic and go for 100 books this time around.  That averages out to 8 1/3 books per month, and I’ve already read nine so far this year.  So that’s a good start.  If I find I’m reading more every month, there are points during the year where you can move your challenge goalposts, so I can increase to 150 if I want.  But I’m not going to particularly try for that, I’ll just see how I do.