Happy New Year! It’s 2024. How was your 2023? Did you achieve some or all of your goals? If not, that’s okay. I started some things just to see if I could do them. I started things to see if they’d actually have some sort of effect on my life. Around June of 2023 I started trying to meal plan. I have hundreds of recipes that I love and bunches that the rest of the family loves, too. But somehow, by the end of the day I just couldn’t decide what to make. If I wanted something out of our ordinary menu, I had to run out and buy the ingredients, which delayed preparing the meal. It was time and money consuming. Now, I sit down at the end of the month and plan the next month’s meals. It gives me a road map so I know what to buy – no more 11th hour trips to the grocery store to pick up “that one thing!” to make the meal go right. No more “default” meals of pasta or chicken breasts because those are easy and I almost always have the items on hand.

What do I plan for 2024? Of course carrying on with meal planning, but there are some other plans I’ve made, too. I don’t like the word “resolution.” It always seems like something that has to be done or else the day or week or other time constraint is a failure. I recently took a “fresh start” course with one of my writing groups. It went very in-depth about planning out goals for the year, breaking them up into manageable chunks all the way down to daily tasks. Some plans that will change what you all are seeing here:

– A goal of blogging once a week. New blogs will be released every Tuesday. I’ll have some special blogs for holidays or other occasions, too, to celebrate things big and small.

– A renewed dedication to my short story writing. You all may have noticed I’d started some paranormal short stories on Kindle Vella. I’ll be continuing with these, and I’ll be posting when new episodes are released.

Some plans will allow me to reach for my dreams more than ever before:

– A renewed dedication to my novel. When it’s not my full time job, it’s not something that gets prioritized. This class has shown me how to make sure my writing gets the attention it deserves while also being able to accomplish the many other things I need to accomplish.

What are some of your goal – not resolutions – for 2024?