Wednesday, January 1, 2014

2013 Wrap-Up and Goals for 2014


I only participated in one Challenge this year, the TBR Pile Challenge, and you can see how I did HERE.  I participated in quite a few Giveaway Hops.  I sponsored my September is for Sequels Challenge for the 2nd year, and started a November is for Novellas Challenge.  I passed 1800 followers on GFC.  I got to meet a ton of cool authors, as well as some cool ones I'd met before.  I finally got a school library job this year as well.  My Goodreads goal was 120, and I surpassed it quite a bit!  I won quite a few giveaways this year, only adding to my already huge TBR pile.  All in all, 2013 was a pretty good year.  I'm hoping 2014 will be even better!

For one thing, I plan to attend BEA again this summer!  Yay!!!  Along with that, I'm really going to do some work on trying to get invited to at least one publisher party, like Harlequin Teen or similar.  Just don't know how to go about doing that.  I'll look into it, and start asking around.  Hope there will be a lot of my fellow bloggers there to meet again this year!  I was really wanting to go to ALA this summer now that I'm officially a librarian, but as of now, the plane tickets are way too expensive, so that will probably not happen.  But I did see that the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) will be having their big convention in October in St. Louis, so I will plan to try to go to that.  I will also be setting my Goodreads goal to 125 this year.  

Other blog/reading goals, hmm.  Well, I didn't get around to re-designing my blog this past year, but I'm still hoping to do that this year.  Maybe I can finally get my youngest sister to help me finally.  I plan to have a giveaway every time I reach another milestone of followers.  In fact I need to go pick my 1800 follower winner tonight.  When I reach 1900, I'd like to do a giveaway.  However, I know a lot of people are more into Bloglovin' than GFC these days, so maybe I need to do a giveaway for that as well.  One other thing I want to do is a bit of a change in how I title my blog posts.  I want to start them out with "Review" if it is a review.  That way I can see better how many reviews I'm getting done.  So that's one idea.  And when I'm reading something for my 2014 Prequel and Sequel Challenge, I need to make sure I put something about that in the title so I can keep track as I go along.  

Personal goals, I didn't really reach any of them last year I don't think, not with the walking/exercising/losing weight that is.  But I will try to work on it again!  One thing though, I have an issue that I will need to have surgery for, and it is something that I think has contributed to my weight issue.  So I'm hoping to take care of that in March during my spring break.  Afterwards, I'm hoping I'll be able to get back to my walking, etc.  Well, after I recover, which I'm told could be 3-4 weeks.  And I'm going to set this reward, once I lose 15 pounds, I plan to get my next tattoo, a dachshund of some sort!!  Still coming up with ideas for what I want to do.  And the final goal is to work on training my dogs better.  The older one will be 3, and she's gotten pretty good.  The puppy, now a little over a year, well, he is hiking his little leg on everything, and so I'm going to have to learn to be more strict with him.  If I can't keep my eye on him because I'm on the computer or something, he'll have to be in a cage.  When he's out, on a leash so he can't sneak away from me.  And I think the hardest will be putting him in a cage at night so he won't get down and pee on something while I'm sleeping.  Someone told me to try the leash at night, but I'm afraid somehow he'd strangle himself if I didn't wake up, so I don't know about that. 

So you've probably heard enough about my plans for the year.  Hoping to stay on top of all of them this year.  Also hoping I've remembered everything I want to do this year!  Thanks to all of my followers for being here, and I hope to hear more from you this year!