Hello 2024. Love, Eliza
I'm very much the kind of person to forget to do my end of year recap posts and my New Year's intentions posts on time. BUT I have been thinking about it a lot over the past few weeks whilst trying to drag myself out of a reading slump and dealing with my body being a jerk.
2023 for was weird for me. I achieved a lot of personal goals, did a lot of cool things and met a lot of amazing people. It was, however, ladened with a lot of pain and medical shit that was just exhausting to say the least.
A few Key Achievements:
Read 84 books out of my goal of 75
Was approved for 9 ARCs to review
Listened to approx. 130K minutes of music
Travelled overseas to see some friends
Captured a lot of memories
You might think the music one is a tad random, but I find a lot of the time my brain does a little too much thinking if I don't have background sound to muffle the noise. Also at least 50% of the music listened to was chillhop/lo-fi which tracks as that's my reading music!
So 2024, what's on the cards.
Intention One: Spend less money to trim debt owed and start saving
For anyone who knows me in person, will know I have a really bad spending habit. I've spoken about it on all iterations of my personal blog, to the former version of this site. I'm very much in the mindset of spend now, think about it later - which for someone looking to pay off their debt and start saving, isn't the best way to view spending.
To start on this journey, I've reduced the amount of Twitch subscriptions I house, halved the Monthly Book Subscriptions I have, and gotten rid of some services I don't use as often as I thought. It may not be a lot at first but spending close to £80 a month on a mixture of the aforementioned things will tick up over the year.
Another thing money wise I intend to do is, 'Any excess from the month will be split towards additional debt payments and saving for my one big trip of the year'. This will hopefully let me pay off a few things whilst saving to see my wonderful site co-owner Girlgeek in the latter half of the year!
Intention Two: Reading goals and reviews
The big one for reading this year is trying to best our reading goal from 2023. I look to read 90
books this year. Admittedly, I'm behind schedule right now by about 3 books BUT we will make it.
I'm also on a self imposed book buying ban - there are a few caveats I added, but this is because past me was way to energetic in pre-ordering a lot of releases for this year. The main rule is, 'Unless purchased with a gift card/previously accumulated store credits, part of the 2 subscriptions I kept, or a pre-order before ban was imposed, I will not be purchasing new books'. A definite mouthful I know.
This is in an attempt to get through my large and growing collection of books. We've all been there, go out with the intention of browsing and leaving with an arm full of book when we literally have 20+ at home unread - I know I'm not alone with this and anyone that says otherwise is in denial.
Final thing for reading, is to definitely have a more consistent schedule with posting the reviews I complete. I am a very opinionated person when it comes to my reading and I complete a lot of reviews on things I have read. I'm just not the best at remembering to post them anywhere XD. So far, I have my calendar updated with timings on when certain reviews are needed to be posted, and I have a plan to slowly drip through ones I have written previously.
Intention Three: Try to stay positive
I will keep this one short and sweet as I have waffled on a lot in the previous bits, but my final intention for 2024 is to stay positive.
I've mentioned it a couple times before, but 2023 was very taxing on my mental with health and family issues. Knowing that some of these have rolled over into the new year and are already making me feel a little on the crappy side, it's very easy for me to fall into these bad habits and detrimental thinking patterns. So I want to TRY and keep myself in a good headspace.
I'll end this post here before I get a little too carried away. I'm looking forward to spending this year with you all. Well wishes and love for all who see this post.
Love Eliza <3
P.S. we made a donation goal for pc upgrades and my post can be found here on Ko-Fi about this <3 https://ko-fi.com/post/New-Donation-Goal-S6S0SNV2L
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