A Few Simple New Year’s Resolutions

I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions – I prefer to set challenges and commitments at any time of year – but I have a few professional and reading-related goals that I will share here for the sake of accountability.

Career

1. Target a few more big-name publications. My work will appear in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Los Angeles Review of Books in the early months of 2016 – that’s progress, but I’d like to work on getting some other noteworthy publications.
2. Assess which freelance gigs are working for me and which ones are not worth it. Sometimes I look at the number of hours I put into a project compared to the ultimate payment amount and think I must be crazy to continue with it.
3. Find ways of being paid into my British bank account rather than hoarding lots of dollars in an American bank account where they’re not doing me much good.

Leisure Reading

4. Focus on reading more of the books I actually own. This means cutting down on NetGalley and Edelweiss requests and volunteer reviewing!
5. Keep an ongoing priority list of books and authors I want to try, and make steady progress through it. On the list so far: Elena Ferrante, Matt Haig, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Wallace Stegner, Tim Winton, and Nell Zink.

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What are some of your goals for 2016 – reading-related or otherwise?