2025: Balance, Books, Bloganuary

Hello, my lovelies. Welcome, I suppose, to 2025.

What? I don’t seem all that excited about it? Well, yeah. Have you even looked outside? It’s a goddamned dumpster fire out there.

But we persevere.

In 2022, on a whim, I decided to start a book blog. I was going to write one book review per week, for 52 weeks. I bought a domain (fiftytwo.blog), and set to involving myself in the Book Blogosphere.

I made it to 50 weeks before Donna shut me down.

(Remember that Donna lives in my brain and controls my dopamine. I hate her quite a bit.)

And then, I foolishly let the domain expire, and all that work is just sitting there, sad, wanting for readers.

So, my plan this winter…ok, ONE of my plans this winter is to transfer all those reviews here, backdated to their original publication dates. That may be confusing, to suddenly see posts popping up from three years ago, hence this heads up. I’m also not changing any of the graphics on those reviews, and as they were designed to fit in with the…vibe of that site, well, they may look slightly out of place.

I can’t help that. They are time capsules. But I want them here, I want people to be able to read them. I don’t want them lost. I worked hard on them, dammit.

I do regret the choice three years later to focus that blog so narrowly. If there was something else I wanted to talk about, I felt almost apologetic, like I know that this (insert other content here) isn’t what you readers signed up for. I felt pressured to get right back to talking about books, before my (admittedly small) audience got restless.

But I did have other things I wanted to talk about. I love books, and I love reading, and I love talking about books, and talking about reading. But I also like talking about other things. Politics. Activism. Diamond painting. Meditation. Board Games. RPGs. And I feel like here is a place where all of those things might find a home.

Which leads me to what passes for news in this part of my world—I have decided to embark on a different sort of book project for 2025, and will be blogging about at least part of it here. In all my years as an active reader, I have never kept a physical reading journal. For some reason, I feel compelled to keep one this year. And I figure that I may, as part of that project, also drop mini-reviews here. Not the kind that I was writing three years ago—just a sentence or two. Very high level, very ten-thousand feet. But I liked being mindful about the books I was reading, and I would like to be again. So, some of the content this year will be very book-focused.

I also wanted to participate this year in Bloganuary, but the organizers seem to have dropped the ball and the prompts are …difficult to locate. This might be the prompt, but I am really not sure. Nevertheless, since all Bloganuary really is is a commitment to blog every day in January, one prompt really is as good as another, innit?

And that brings us to our final B: Balance. My biggest challenge has always been balance. I allow myself to get hyper-focused on one hobby, and everything else falls by the wayside. It’s all I want to think about. All I want to talk about. It’s the One True Hobby, the one I have looked for my entire life and all hobbies that came before it were mere pretenders.

But, see, I actually liked those other hobbies. And I don’t want to ignore them.

So, 2025 is going to be the year that I successfully balance blogging and reading and Spanish class and diamond painting and meditation and activism. I’m going to do all of it, just a little at a time. I’m not going to get so caught up in any one thing that I don’t do anything else. CAN’T do anything else. Cause I get burnt out on that one thing and then…then I have to move on to the NEXT One True Hobby. And the cycle begins anew.

It’s really kind of excruciating.

So. Balance. Wish me luck.

Love Y’all,