New Year!

It's a new year, which is a time for reflection and making goals.  I thought I'd share some of my reflections and goals with you.

• I did not meet my Goodreads goal this year.  I've decided that this is because my goal is too high.  Reading a book a week makes it hard to read longer books.  It also makes it hard when I'm bouncing off a book or getting stuck on one.  Sometimes I feel as if I have to finish it and it's painful.  Sometimes it feels as though if I'm not going to finish it on time for a weekly blog post, what's the point?  So I'm changing my goals this year to reading 30 books, and writing a blog post every week.  I can write about about what I've learned or what I'm thinking about.
• Season 4 is written except for some tweaking.  I plan to record next week or the week after, and start putting episodes up by the end of January.  Season 4 is a little different.  I wanted to tell three longer stories, so I had each of them as four episodes, then I rotated through: story A for epsides1, story B for episode 2, story C for episode 3, and story A for episode 4.  This was a bad idea, because listeners would have to wait 3 weeks for each story to continue.  Also, at the beginning, there wasn't enough evidence that the story would come back, so the episodes just felt unfinished and lacking.  So I rearranged, and season 4 will only have three episodes.  Each episode will be about four times as long as usual, but still, the season will probably feel short.
• Season 5 will go back to basics with monsters of the week. 
• My Firebird novel is finally looking readable after this last edit, and after the current edit, it's looking like it'll be a good book.  I'm hoping to have this edit done by the end of the month, then I need to write the end and some some additional sections that turned up lacking when I started editing.  The writing will be next month, and I hope to have it ready for first readers by the end of February.
• I also want to apply for a scholarship to a writing conference, which is due mid January.  Last year, I answered "Why I want to attend the conference" with an essay about how I was a time traveler and me attending the conference might save humanity.  Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, I didn't win.  This year, I'm planning something equally silly, and I'll share it with you when I hear the results.  I'm hoping it'll become a tradition: I send a weird story in hopes they let me go to a conference for free, or at least someone finds it entertaining.