It's the start of a new decade. I've just finished the fourth major draft of Imbolc Night at the Fishpunk Ball, and I've been taking advantage of my time in England to catch up on all the kinds of cider I can't get in the U.S.A. I've also been ripping DVDs to an external hard drive so I can take them with me (one of those rare cases where I really am just making personal copies of things I legally own), which is why my desk is surrounded with towers of cases.
I like schedules and schemes, I tend to be more productive with my hobbies when I can reduce them to quotas. (Writing excepted, trying to tabulate word count never seems to work.) As such, in the past few years I've made Resolutions to do various things, and I've even posted some of them. Not last year's though, which is a pity, as I can't remember what I resolved to do last year.
Nevertheless. With a new year, and a new decade at that, I have been considering for the past few weeks a few not-so-grandiose schemes for the coming year. Here, then, are the resolutions, as part of a grand self-betterment project labelled an Undertaking:
1) Read the Bible cover to cover. Yes, I declared I was starting this 1 1/2 years ago, but I got as far as the end of Genesis before getting heartily sick of the Bible I was using, and deciding that I'd start it up again as soon as I could find a King James Bible. Since then I've checked in every second-hand bookstore, and nothing. (And I thought the USA was stereotypically uber-Christian.) I've therefore borrowed my father's copy (atheists can be surprisingly well stocked with religious texts), and I'll be reading an annotated NIV for interpretation.
2) Be more aware of current events. For this, I'll be getting subscriptions to The Week and The Economist. A weekly meta-newspaper and a weekly analysis of current events - that should do nicely, so long as I make time to read them. (After which I might be better informed to answer the question 'how much current events do you have to know, as your duty as a citizen, and how much news is cyclic that I can safely dismiss'.)
3) Read/watch every Shakespeare play. I'm not certain if I can do this, but it'd be great to have done it. Plus I have my sister's BBC Shakespeare set to borrow from. (Currently copying The Taming of the Shrew starring John Cleese - that should be interesting.)
4) A few other things. After all, does anybody really want to hear me bleating that this year I'll finally have some good enough stories I can submit to publishers? Nah. So that's all, tally ho, have a good decade, and make sure you smash that glass ceiling of the cosmos on your ascent to (in)famy.