Welcome one and all to a very Athena Veta season of good will! Athena’s a friend of the show, as it were, and general all-around cool person; she also happens to be extremely smart, so check out her blog at the AmbiGaming Corner for deep and well-considered thoughts on what we can learn from gaming as well as a whole bunch of other always-interesting stuff.

For the holiday season this year, Athena’s coordinated an event based on that classic Marmite of tunes (you love it or you hate it): The Twelve Days of Christmas. Each day from December 26th to January 6th, we’ll look at a gamified version of one of the song’s lines until eventually we have 364 gamey gifts!

On the first day of Blogmas, the gamers said to me: What are twelve favourite gaming memories?

On the second day of Blogmas, the gamers said to me: Tell us eleven games you love!

On the third day of Blogmas, the gamers said to me: What are ten reasons you would play a game?

On the fourth day of Blogmas, the gamers said to me: Give us nine games on your to-play list!

On the fifth day of Blogmas, the gamers said to me: Eight characters you love!

On the sixth day of Blogmas, the gamers said to me: Share seven of your favourite posts!

On the seventh day of Blogmas, the gamers said to me: Tell us your six gaming/ blogging resolutions!

Y’know, I have actually been thinking a bit about something along these lines recently. My main resolution for 2019 is to [1. have, maintain, and actually follow through on a to-do list and a schedule of getting stuff done]; up to now I’ve pretty much just written ad hoc, which has been fun but not very consistent. Then in November blogging took a back seat to NaNoWriMo, in which I wrote 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days. November was an odd time because not only did I do that, but I also ended up taking part in a really great blog-laboration courtesy of Normal Happenings and even became a contributor unexpectedly to gaming site Obilisk.

Given all of that, it’s perhaps not that surprising that I felt a bit burned out and ended up taking something of a break for December. I have conflicting feelings: on the one hand, if I don’t write then I feel bad about not writing and I’ll never make anything happen with it, but on the other if I do write seriously then I feel increased pressure and fear of trying and failing.

So I’m continuing to have a bit of time off for the holidays, which I think is a healthy enough decision for now. It’s allowing me to spend more time playing games just for fun; I’m replaying the game which is of course my favourite of all time, Kingdom Hearts 2, and having a great time with it doing awesome fun things I’ve not done before like a level 1 run.

That said, what should my to-do list include for 2019? Well, there will be some bloggy things, some gamey things, and some non-bloggy-non-gamey-writey things. So here’s what I’d like to have on it:

2. Play more games just for fun and not because I have to for a review or anything. Don’t get me wrong, I love reviewing games, but I need to also just enjoy games because I love them as they are from time to time without thinking too hard about them! (Not that I won’t end up thinking too hard about everything anyway, but even I have to switch off and just have fun and take care of myself.)

3. Finish draft 1 of my NaNo novel; finish draft 3 of Stargirl (and come up with a new title for it); finish draft 1 of half-done novel Fixer’s Breakers; write one collection of five short stories; if still time, go back and do draft 2 of NaNoNovel. Those are my objectives for fiction writing in 2019, and if I can do all of those I’ll feel I’ve done alright for the year!

4. Organise one bloggaboration. I love being part of community collaborations, but I’ve never actually organised one. (Weeeeeell… LaterLevels‘ Kim and I have been developing something of an idea behind the scenes over the last couple of months – check LaterLevels on January 7th to find out all about that!) I don’t think I’m sufficiently organised to come up with and manage a large-scale event solo, especially since they often take multiple months to come to fruition, but I would like to put on perhaps something small that a few people can just… I dunno, have some fun with. Watch this space.

5. Contribute at least five articles to each of the sites I write for, and do my best to get an article published on one new one. So that means long-form reviews for The Well-Red Mage, opinion pieces for Obilisk, and…. well, I guess something else for somewhere else! You’ll notice that poor OverThinker Y isn’t included here, and… well, I do want to continue putting out things here in my usual informal style of wondering about stuff, but I’d like to focus more on better-structured and more professional-ish things. So there will certainly still be an OverThinker Y for collaborations, events, and general musings, but I do expect that most of my longer and more in-depth work will be for other sites going forwards.

6. Read more posts and interact with more fellow bloggers! This is a huge community of people who are writing incredibly entertaining, interesting, thought-provoking, hilarious things all the time, and I’ve got really bad at keeping up with all the things that people are producing. Next year I want to be giving more likes, leaving more comments, having more discussions and generally having more interaction with my fellow oddballs.

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Will I keep to all of these in 2019? I’ve no idea! I think they’re all pretty doable, but it’ll take me figuring out and implementing a structure and some time management that’s actually reasonable for me to be able to stick to. Only time will tell…!

Of course, I’m writing this in advance, so I don’t know who else is taking part or what they’ll have written, but I bet there are a bunch of other awesome people writing incredibly cool things on this very topic today, so check out the AmbiGaming Corner and probably Twitter for some links! See you tomorrow for the next day of Blogmas…