silveradept | Jan. 3rd, 2022

snowflake_challenge is indeed happening again this year.

Challenge #1 was to get your housekeeping on, make sure your profiles are up to date and your sticky posts are stickied (and also, this is a good time for you to update or create a transformative works policy for your work, so that it's much easier for people to know whether or not it's okay to record your things, remix them, or otherwise, or whether you want them not to do so at all. Not everyone is on good enough terms with the people that you want to remix to be able to ask them.)

Since there wasn't anything major that needed updating, there wasn't a post for #1. #2, on the other hand, asks for something that requires an output.

In your own space, set some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private.

Goals and resolutions are a fraught thing for many people in regular years. In these pandemic-powered years where everything is still disrupted and a return to something that doesn't require constant vigilance is still a very long way away, the idea of setting goals or trying to work toward something other than "survive, by whatever means are available" seems like foolish thinking.

( The windup to the things themselves )

I looked at last year's goal: To be the best person that I can be, to celebrate them when they are awesome, and to find a way of making them better when they're not. That still seems like an applicable goal for this year. Past that, to get all my exchanges and prompts in on time without defaults. That's what I aim for every year, but it's probably worth mentioning to myself that last year, that meant a total output of 27 works to AO3 of more than 100k of words, plus the incidentals, one-offs, 3 Sentence Ficathon, linkdumps, December Days, Snowflake and Sunshine Challenges, the weekly commentary read, and any other things that I wrote that didn't track quite as easily for wordcount. Add on to something like not dropping the ball on being a professional librarian and making sure that I contribute what I can to the upkeep of the house and the household and that's probably got the calendar full up before thinking about anything that I might do for myself to recharge.

And yet, I kind of want to explore a place like the Fediverse and get to understand it better, but I'm stuck being afraid that the first choice will be wrong, even though I know that it's entirely possible to pull up stakes and move, if necessary. Suggestions welcome. I want to be able to dream bigger about what my organization can do, even as I also need to be able to catalog all the reasons why that's a much bigger ask than it appears to be, and to be ready to hear not just "no," but "yes, but that's a three year project to get all the approvals necessary and the resources in place."

So I guess I do have goals for this year, but how many of them are going to have tangible end products? I haven't a clue. And I guess that's why I feel like I have trouble with goals.