Greetings and Salutations, Blog Readers!

The year of 2021 is winding down, and we are all looking forward to the New Year. Well, to be honest, I have no idea if all of you are, but I am. I always look forward to New Years, the same way I look forward to Mondays. We get a new start, a new lease, a new beginning in the ever-continuing journey of life.

My goals for this year were to get better in a few ways. I wanted to grow as a person, to get better with my mental health, and make strides with that journey, and in that way, it has been a resounding success. My goals were also to learn how to make pasta, ramen, and dumplings. I haven’t perfected the Dumplings yet, but I did nail pasta and ramen, and have even written up a blog to share with everyone to help anyone else learn how to make ramen, more so if you don’t want to add sodium.

Without getting into too many of my goals for this past year, I do want to discuss some of my goals for the year we are going into.

As some of you may know, I have been working hard all month to set my intention for the new year.  I have been using my planner to record my weekly goals and schedule, including the habit tracker, where I track things like taking my vitamins every day, drinking water, stretching, journaling, reading, and, in the last week, not smoking.

Yes, I am quitting cigarettes again. I had quit before covid, and the stress of everything that happened before the entire world went through a pandemic, and then the stress of the pandemic, the shutdowns, all of that, I picked the little fuckers back up.

But I am one week off them, and other than when I am on the phone, I am doing great and don’t miss them. When on the phone, I miss cigarettes, but I am working on being okay without them. I had reduced down to less than three a day, normally no more than one or two, when on the phone with Lenyn or my mom, but now I am on none. I also will be doing more cardio and stretching and am investing in a treadmill to get back into walking and, *gasp* running. I will be doing a LENGTHY blog post all about that, in the new year, when I am mentally able to do it.

Overall, I plan on using my fairly efforts to build better mental and physical health, including using my habit tracker.

The habit tracker is something I have been scared to use, for fear of failing, but, as you may recall from a previous blog post, I can’t get over the fear of failure (and success) much yet achieve my goals, without using it, so I have been writing down my goals for the week and month, and using my daily habit tracker…

Massive improvement. Even on today, when I am not doing well in terms of motivation, I am able to push forward and attack some of my goals and make things happen.

I have been hard at work in working on the publishing version of Flake City Volume One, and also been working on the project FCM- Which I haven’t been talking about much, but once I hit my first landmark goal on it, I will likely discuss.

But, yeah, I have not done the KDP publishing for books proper, only low content projects like coloring books or journals, so I am having to not only edit my book by myself (one woman publishing house) but also format it, and make the cover, along with make the description, the meta data, and all the advertising and marketing for the book itself. What I am working on now, is formatting the Microsoft document into a PDF for KDP.

I say all this to say that between editing and formatting, the blog hasn’t gotten much attention, in addition to holidays, the side projects, more creative writing, my social life, plus my daily objectives…I have neglected the poor blog. I am hoping to address that in my new year’s goals.

The big blog goal is to get blog posts scheduled in advance, blog posts like book, movie, show, and game reviews, recipes, and of course, the classic daily blogs, along with whatever productivity blogs I come up with.

I will be doing to daily blogs, when time allows, and will batch write the rest of the blog posts and schedule them in advance, so weeks won’t go by with no posts, when life gets extra busy. This is a major goal I hope to get a jump on this week, so I can launch into the new year with a healthy selection of batched blogs, all illustrated and scheduled, so I can have more mental space, and less worry, about the blog content going up.

The content will also, I hope, involve more survivalist and prepper content, as the world tends to be very uncertain, but also as someone who spends a ton of time reading zombie stuff, it seems smart to pass lots of disaster prep tips and advice onto my readers, specifically things that help content creators or creatives in general, as we tend to not be considered “prepared” for disaster, and, frankly, we need to be prepared, as the life of creators can be very uncertain, without any sort of disaster.

Plus, preparedness is sexy and a massive passion of mine, and my blog should always reflect myself and the things I love.

Anyways, I say all that to explain my goals and efforts for the new year as it regards to this blog.

As for myself, I will be continuing to read and journal every day, stretch every day, drink water, and take my vitamins. I will be assessing my efforts every month or so and adding whatever I need to further myself along on my journey to being the type of person I want to be.

My path has been productive and good, and between my own efforts and my therapist’s hard work, I have made enormous progress, and plan to continue to build on it. A year ago, my life looked totally different from how it looks now, and I am so happy with the changes I have made, and I am glad to be where I am, so I want to continue those efforts to make sure I continue my path, and to see how much more I can improve my life with another year of efforts. Always be upgrading myself, as it were.

For my creative efforts, I have BIG goals, which is why I have been working so hard on time management and getting ready for the new year. I want to get back to my YouTube content grind, posting more gaming videos with lo fi music, but also, I would like to post more vlog content as well, along with cooking and survival type vlogs, likely all mixed together in a way that defies algorithmic designs and doesn’t actually help me gain subscribers, but who cares, it’s making content I like.

I also want to launch my podcast, hopefully with a guest host or two, or with rotating guest hosts and guests.

I also want to release the book and eBook for Flake City Volume One, finish writing, and maybe publish Volume Two. I will also be finishing phase one of the writing for the side project, FCM, and then will announce said project to you all.

I am going to be also writing more of the zombie stories that will take place once the action from Volume Two have concluded, which will form more of my magic universe, along with other stories from each of my characters that will grow the story I am slowly unveiling.

I may add more to my plate, during my assessments each month, but I want to make sure I don’t have too much on my plate, as my plate is already pretty damn full.

So, these are my efforts and goals for the new year, and I have every intention of achieving them. I also have some culinary goals, including learning to make mead, from yeast harvested from potatoes. All in all, I have many goals, and some game plans for making it happen, along with accountability methods built into my systems to make sure I achieve my goals.

What goals are you setting for yourself, and what methods are you putting into place to make sure you achieve them?

Thanks for reading,

Abbi