I’m hoping to blog more in 2024. I have an idea for a series of posts about board games, and since this term I’m teaching British Lit, Short Fiction (which will mostly entail reading short SFF stories with my students), and Creative Writing, I figure I’ll have a few things to say about writing, literature, and the fantastical as it pertains to my work in the classroom.

For Brit Lit this semester, my focus is on monsters. We’ll start with Beowulf, then The Tempest (and perhaps A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Macbeth too), and finally Shelley’s Frankenstein. What makes something a monster? Are monsters made or born? How does our idea of the monstrous change over time?

Mostly I wanted to teach these three texts, so I created a driving question to link them all. But mostly, I just wanted to read them with my students. I’m curious to see their reactions, especially for Beowulf, which is always a harder sell in an all-girls school. I mean, I’m a woman and I love Beowulf, but when I’ve taught it to young women in the past, it’s been a mixed reaction. The only major female character is a monstrous fen-hag, and the other women in the story serve as peacemakers and such (to solidify alliances and end blood-feuds), so I get why for some of the young women I teach, there’s not much to engage them.

But I’m hoping some of them will come to love the action, the world-building, and the overall spirit of the poem. I myself read it in high school (part of it anyway), and I’ve loved Beowulf ever since.

I’m not making any kind of resolution to blog everyday or anything. Not that such a goal is bad; I’ve attempted every-day blogging before and it was great. But I can’t meet such a challenge this year, nor do I really want to. I’m more focused on staying consistent with my fiction writing and increasing my word count in that realm. But I still like blogging and don’t want it falling dormant. Thus, my commitment to a more regular blogging habit for 2024.

Maybe once a week? Maybe once every two weeks? Maybe several times a week? I don’t have firm plans as of yet. I’m waiting to see how these first few weeks of January shake out, how much time I can actually find to blog more frequently, and how easy it is to find topics to write about. As I mentioned earlier, I have plans, but maybe those plans aren’t tenable. Time will tell.

One of my biggest goals/ambitions for this new year, on a personal level, is to finally start playing more of the board games and role-playing games that adorn my shelves. We have an entire closet filled with board games we’ve (mostly) never played. This is so frustrating! I LOVE board games, and yet here in my very house there languishes a collection of sundry entertainments and diversions of which I have never availed myself. This is madness!

I plan to correct such mismanagement by taking one game out each week and learning to play it. I may play it with husband or friends, or I may play solo, but either way, I’m committing myself to playing the board games in my house. Carpe diem and all that.

I’m going to try blogging about the games too; I just need a snappy name to call this “regular” feature. (I have “The Things That Shaped Me” feature which I should also get back to, but maybe I’ll call my board game excursion “Cabinet of Curiosities” or something of that sort… which I know is already a tag on my blog, but this will just make it more official.)

Anyway, I’m not calling any of this a “resolution.” I make New Year’s resolutions, and I’ve already made a few in other realms of my life for 2024, so I’m not opposed to resolutions in general. But I’m not making a blogging resolution this year. Nothing that firm. This blogging commitment is more of a New Year’s inclination. An urge to blog more. Let’s see how it shakes out.