Reaching New Heights: My Reading, Personal and Blogging Goals for 2024

It is that day again, Tuesday, time for another top 10 post. I hope that you stick to it until the end because this is going to be a long one. It took me longer to write than come up with the goals itself. I hope you enjoy my goals and that it may inspire you to have goals for yourself or just to take the next step in your life.

Blogging goals

 1.        Write more posts and post regularly.

This is something I have been struggling with for a long time. It is very difficult for me to find the time to sit down and write a post. A lot of thought and research goes into the posts I write, so it also takes me a lot of time to finish any posts. This year I hope to change this by setting the bar low. I want to start with posting twice a week. Two posts should be a manageable amount. I want to do this for both of my blogs. I got a second blog, where I write about music, something I thought would be as easy as writing about books, but it turns out that it is a bit more difficult for me. Music is even more personal than books, I still need to find my flow for this blog, it will be something I will also be working on.

2.        Add translations to all my posts.

When I started out blogging on my previous blog, Ice Cold Passion, and before that Ice Queen’s Bookshelf, I wanted to create content for both an international audience as well as my own country. I know it is ambitious to have all my posts available in two languages, but it is something that I have wanted to do since I started. I am glad I finally made the switch to a different platform for blogging, my sites are now built with Wix, which has a built-in function that makes it easy to offer your site in multiple languages. I have already tried to do this for Finding Flight Cases but I have not yet managed to translate everything yet, so I want to change that. As for Witchy Reads, posts are currently only available in English. And for now, it is fine, I want to focus first on goal one, getting posts out twice a week. When I have mastered that, I want to continue with this second goal. I think that this might even be a multiple-year project, let’s see how far I make it this year.

3.        Include Witchy content.

This one is specifically for Witchy Reads, with witchy content I mean not only read Witchy fiction but also non-fiction books, but also broader than only reading books. I would like to have informative posts about witchcraft, spells, and divination. To help me explore my journey into this. My post on the Yule bread I posted at the end of the year is one example of what I want to do. I want to dive deeper into my spiritual side, and I want to take you all with me on the journey, letting you also know what works for me and what does not. I hope this will give me the balance I need in life, reconnect with nature and will make me overall a better person.

Personal Goals

 4.        Be nicer to myself.

This may seem strange as a blogging goal, but it does thigh into my first goal a bit. 2023 was a very hard year for me, I have come to realize that I want more out of life. I had started exploring this more, what do I want? What do I want to achieve in life? What do I still want to learn?

I have concluded that what I have been doing for years is not healthy for me. The amount of work and responsibility that I took on to my plate was insane, and it has been giving me health problems for years, because I went over all the boundaries my body was giving me. I did not understand why, I kept doing this and decided to get help.

At first, I did not know where to start and where the heart of my problems was based. After a while, I figured that out and I found a specialized therapist who kindly put a lot of things in perspective for me. She helped me realize that things needed to change, even though it meant taking a step out of the “safety zone” that I had created for myself.  In the end, it also meant leaving the company I had built together with my sister.

This was the hardest decision I have ever made, but it is also the best decision I have ever made. It was the cause of all my health issues. Now I can start healing and explore what I want to do with the rest of my life, dreams I want to achieve.

5.        Continue my musical journey.

By the end of 2023, I have started doing some of the things I have been wanting to do for a long time. One of those things was taking singing lessons. I want to learn how to sing correctly and to see what I can really do with my voice. I love singing it makes me very happy. I want to continue my lessons and hope that I can also find my own sound and which genre I want to sing.

I also want to learn how to play guitar, specifically electric guitar, I have had some lessons in the past but never continued as other things were more important at the time. Now that I have more time for self-care I want to see if I can learn how to play and play the songs I love.

Reading Goals

6.        Finish at least 1 book a month

This is also in line with being kinder to myself, and not pushing myself too much to get stuff done. If I do not manage to do what I have planned, I still have some wiggling room left for myself. The goal overall this year is to reset boundaries that have been destroyed. Also, I to not overwork myself and be oké with not doing anything occasionally.

I have set my Goodreads goal a little higher than 1 book a month since I have the feeling that this is going to be a great reading year. I have set out to read 25 books in 2024. Currently, I have already finished two books, both I started in 2023, but was not able to finish before the end of the year. I hope I will finish one of the non-fiction books, I have started as well in this month.  

I am currently reading Queen of Shadows by Sarah J. Maas, which I think would be too ambitious to finish before the end of the month. I am now a hundred pages out of the 600 pages, I am not going to push myself too much. It would be a good start if I do manage to finish it. Then I have tackled 4 books in one month!

7.        Lower my To-Be-Read pile.

There are over 200 books on my TBR at this moment. This is only counting the physical copies, this excludes any old ARCs, which I will get to in my next goal, or any eBooks that I own. I am also not counting any non-fiction books that I own.

It would be awesome to lower my TBR by a hundred books, that would unfortunately not be very realistic. I will also be adding some books to my TBR, I have two books incoming this month, and on Saturday five books arrived.

A realistic goal would be twenty books, this would already be a great achievement.  I might add a monthly post where I track my progress, as an extra reminder. I think that would be fun.

8.        Finish old ARC’s.

I still have some old Advance Reading Copies, that I would like to get to this year. I stopped to read and review books I think in 2019, as I just felt overwhelmed by the number of requests I got and felt that I needed to accept all of them. I did not know how to say no because I felt honored that they found my little blog and considered me. I went through all my old requests and narrowed it down, there are a lot of them that I never am going to read so I filed them all.

There are two books out of all these old requests I still want to read. The first is Tomorrow Wendel by R.M. Ridley, the premise still sounds interesting, so I want to give this one a chance even though it is old and has only 25 reviews on Goodreads.  The other one is The Emerald Tablet, which I started reading back in the day, but I was not in the right mind for it to finish it.  This is science fiction, I want to try to read a couple of science fiction books to see if this genre is something to read more of or just let go in its entirety.

There are also a couple of Netgalley books that are from around the same period that I want to get to. There are six in total, two sequels, one I have read but did not write a review for, and four random choices. If I do not read any of these this year, I will let them go, file them, and let Netgalley know why I decided not to read them.

There is one more, the only physical advance reading copy I have ever received. Jill’s Talisman it is called, this book is in Dutch and the author Dieter Ryckewaert reached out to me and asked if I wanted to read and review his book. I did indeed read the book, but never put up a review for it. I want to correct this, re-reading the book and writing the review it deserves, as the book was really good.

9.        Finish series or let them go.

Yesterday I spent some time putting together a spreadsheet of all the series I have started but never finished. There are some series I own in its entirety of which I have only read the first book. For example, the Hunger Games, Divergent, Matched, Hush Hush, and Shiver. I just read the one book and never made it to the second book in the series. I feel a little shame, as these were all very popular series.

This just must change, I am going to finish the spreadsheet, as I know I am not even halfway done, and then start finishing series. I have already started this process, as I am currently reading Queen of Shadows, the fourth book in the Throne of Glass series. I am having a very good time with this series, so I plan to finish this in the first half of the year.

To keep myself motivated I can read a second book non-series next to this, so I don’t get bored with the series and stop reading it again. If a series is not keeping me interested or I am unable to finish a book in the series, then I will just have to let the series go. There are so many of them I don’t need to read all of them, especially if I do not enjoy them.

10.  Buy missing books out of the series I have started.

This seems to contradict lowering my TBR, and that is why it is the last one in this top 10 goals, it is oke if I do not manage this for all the series I have started. Let me first finish the series I already own in its entirety. This is just for when my reading year is becoming incredible and I want to consider this. It is not very high on the priority list. It is also in a way a motivation to finish the series I have started. There are a couple of reasons why I don’t seem to finish the series, not owning the sequel is one of them. These goals all go together and support each other. This was not intended but they do.

What are your goals for this year? Let me know in the comments.