Happy New Year!
This week and next week are pretty busy, so this update will be short and in bullet points:
- I wrote three Inkvent fountain pens dry, leaving me with 17 (!) pens to go. I’m prioritizing the pens based on how damaging the ink can potentially be, so I’ve written the Star Bright inks dry (Chilly Nights and Noble Fir) and I’m working my way through the shimmer inks and chameleon inks next.
- I spent a few minutes every day for the past 2-3 days unsubscribing from various email lists, store newsletters and SMS message lists. The joy of a less cluttered inbox and less noise on my phone is fantastic, and it took less time and effort than I thought.
- I’m still reviewing 2024. It’s going to take a while because I have such a busy start of the year.
- Goodreads have really started to gamify and commercialize their site more, and so I’m using it less. I know there are alternatives out there but I just don’t have time to actively seek them out at the moment – let me know in the comments if you have any recommendations.
- I don’t do resolutions (or yearly themes, etc. I do quarterly plans with quantifiable goals), but my stationery goals for 2025 are to buy nothing (or as close to nothing as possible) and to use what I have instead. I have too much stuff and it’s time I used it.
- I checked out the Tournament of Books shortlist and decided yet again not to participate. A few years ago the list had interesting and exciting contemporary fiction, but now there are only a slack handful of shortlisted books that seem worth reading, and I’ve heard of many of them from other places already. It’s a bit of a shame as I had a lot of fun following along when I did.
Have a great week!
Writing at Large 
akapulko2020
I’ve just opened an account in Hardcover app, Goodreads clone/successor, today. Imported all my books from Goodreads but I haven’t left Goodreads, yet.
My trigger: I want to build an app/script for myself to help me process my To-Read list better, but turns out Goodreads shut down generating new keys for the API access in 2020, and I really don’t relish manually downloading the export every time.
So after a short search and a Reddit recommendation, Hardcover, here I come
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writingatlarge
Interesting. Thank you I’ll give it a look.
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miatagrrl
I did some unsubscribing recently too, and I wished I had done it sooner! Even if I had been mildly interested in the subject at some point, if I don’t miss it, I don’t need it regularly filling up my in box. What a relief!
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Allysse
Have you tried Storygraph? I’ve been enjoying using it for the last year or so.
It was easy to transfer my data from Goodreads there which was a nice added bonus as I didn’t need to rebuild all of it or lose all of it.
I’m using the free version and it works well for me, but they do have a paid option too depending on how much data you like about your reading habits (I just want a place to catalogue it all).
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writingatlarge
I haven’t- I will give it a look, thank you 🙏
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Tay
I was going to suggest storygraph as well. They’ve made it very easy to switch from goodreads. And I think their suggestions for next reads are really quite good.
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