Resolutions

Well, I've nearly made my major goal for the end of the year, which was to catch up entirely on my book review posts. As I type this now, the pile of books I needed to write about has shrunk from nineteen a few days ago to four (not including a Manga Friday column for tomorrow I need to finish up and post, and one last review post here for the night and year). I expect to deal with those four over the weekend, and roll into the first working week of 2010 with a clean slate.

Along the way, I realized something -- the books I was putting aside to write about later were primarily genre (SF and Fantasy, specifically), which one would think I'd be more comfortable reviewing, since I spent sixteen years editing the damn things. But the best is always the enemy of the good; I wanted to do those reviews "right," so I'd regularly put them off until I had more time and energy to put into them. And. inevitably, there was never as much time and energy as I wanted, so they sat, unwritten, for months.

The new plan for Antick Musings -- assuming that I do want to continue to write about everything I read, which I think I still do (it's a useful exercise for me, if nothing else) -- is to plan to finish off everything in the month I read it. If it doesn't get written about at length by the last day of the month, it'll get a paragraph in the "Books Read in {thismonth}" post, and that will be the end of it. No more piling up books for six or nine months and expecting to do something about them later; that clearly didn't work.

More happily, I note that, with this and the next post, I'll have 88 posts this month. That's the highest for this year, and only behind August of 2008 (no clue what happened then) and June of 2007 (during Blog in Exile). I'm ending this year 10 posts behind the 2008 pace, which is close enough to even for me -- I don't want to get stuck on an ever-increasing treadmill, even if that's my natural tendency.

And maybe this will mean that, at this time next year, I'll be able to sit somewhere warm and read, instead of sitting somewhere cold and typing. It's a goal to shoot for, at least.

Have a happy 2010, everyone.