Happy New Year!

We had a very nice new year's eve with friends last night - dinner, conversation, laughs, and a movie.  It's been a tradition for us since new year's eve 1999.  Hope you all had as nice a time as we did.

I don't make resolutions - I never have.  But I have decided to participate in a variety of challenges this year.  Some of them are reading challenges, most of which I've already mentioned in earlier posts.  The one I haven't written up yet is the New Author Challenge 2011.

Here are the guidelines:

1. The challenge will run from January 1, 2011 through December 31, 2011.
2. Since this is an author challenge, there is no restriction on choosing your novels. They can definitely be from other challenges. However, the authors must be new to you and, preferably from novels.  Anthologies are a great way to try someone new, but only a third of your new authors can be from anthologies.
3. I want this to be an easy challenge, so you can pick to do either 15, 25 or 50 new authors.  It all depends on how fast you read and how adventurous you want to be. 

I'm signing up for 15 new authors.  I did the New Author Challenge 2010 and really enjoyed it, so I thought I would do it again this year.  I have created pages for each of my reading challenges, which you can see above the posts.  I will be updating those throughout the year.  I have also included pages for the challenges I have done in the past, but Blogger only allows 10 pages, so I may delete the older ones.  I'll have to decide what to do with the older ones, since I don't want to lose the information.

I am also participating in a couple of art challenges this year.  One I've already written up is the Sketchbook Challenge.  Another one I signed up for yesterday is Project52: The Weekly Art Challenge over at ATCsForAll (which I joined a couple of weeks ago).  Here is part of the write up about it:

The goal is be to be creative a minimum of once a week and create something. Your piece of art doesn't necessarily need to be an ATC, it can be a postcard too, a scrapbook page, chunky, inchie, twinchie, a quilt, work on an ongoing project, photography - anything that tickles your creativity!! 

SO - all of that should keep me busy this year!  What about you?  Do you have any great plans for the new year?