New Year's Resolutions

Hey, as-yet-nonexistent readers!

So, you might notice that there are already two posts on this blog. You might also notice they're from October 2013, and this post is being written in January 2015. So, yeah. That's definitely proof of how incredibly lazy I am.
You might ask, then, "why are you writing a blog post now? Wouldn't it make more sense to start a new blog, and let the humiliation of not posting for over a year be forgotten?" But look at the header of the blog! It's so pretty! I worked for like an hour last year to make it look like that. I'm not just going to let that go. Plus, I already snagged the URL "arielkalati" for this. I can't give that up.
"Why now?" you might ask. Wow, so many questions for a figment of my imagination, reader. Well, if you check out the calendar, we're only ten days into 2015, which means we're still in the reasonable zone for starting on New Year's resolutions. One of my resolutions this year was to create a better online writing presence. (Hi, agents and publishers! Please love me!)

So I've decided to start working on this blog again, finally. AND I came up with some snazzy ideas for how to make it exciting and fun for both me and you. Get ready. I'm planning to post two times a week, once on Saturday and once on Wednesday. Wednesdays will be a "regular" blog post, where I'll essentially post short informal essays (or possibly lists of gifs/links) about stuff I care about/possibly writing excerpts. "Stuff I care about" includes:

-Creative writing, the writing industry, YA writers (I'm the creative consultant for a young writers' conference called  Chapter One Con), and more
-Books! I love YA and sci fi/fantasy in particular.
-Fandoms. Especially Harry Potter, but also Percy Jackson/Heroes of Olympus, the Hunger Games, the nerdfighter fandom (if that's a fandom, I don't know), and a lot more. I also like criticizing fandoms, e.g. questioning why Cho Chang is so vilified in the HP fandom.
-Poetry, both the kind you read and the kind you hear someone perform.
-Nature and the seasons. I'm doing a research project this year about the effect of the change of seasons on a particular forest on my campus, so you might get a post called something like "GUYS DID YOU HEAR ABOUT SQUIRRELS." Might. I'm not promising anything.
-Social justice/feminism.
-Educational reform (if you're a high school student who hates the SAT, please keep up with the blog just for this, because I hate the SAT more).
-Other stuff I'm thinking about.

I hope that's not too all-over-the-place for people. If anybody who reads the blog is like, "uh, stop talking about Harry Potter, I want to read more posts about feminism," I am very willing to oblige because guess what? I will do anything to make people like me! Ha ha, oh me.
Anyway. And Saturdays will be extra special blogging days, because I'm planning to do what I am arbitrarily calling "experience blogging" on Saturdays. Which sounds like a New Age Postmodern Hipster sort of thing, but it's just because I'm bad at naming things. What it means is that each week I am going to make myself have a new experience, and then blog about it. That could mean I read a new book or watch a new movie, eat a new food, or go out into the city and check out an art gallery, go to a protest, watch a play (my college is about half theatre kids so that should be easy), go to a meeting of a new club, etc. It just has to be something I haven't done before, or at least something I don't do every freaking week (aka sit in my dorm, sleep until 1 pm, and eat an entire bag of chips while binge-watching Orange is the New Black). And you'll get to hear about it! How exciting.

So, let's all cross our fingers and hope that I don't wimp out on this like I've done with every blog in my life (except my tenth grade angsty poetry blog, which I kept up for a full six months before quitting). And if you subscribe to this blog or leave even one comment, I will probably bake you an entire cake shaped like a heart and send it to you with the power of my appreciation, so do that.

I guess this counts as my Saturday post. It's about the new experience of writing an introductory blog post over a year after writing the actual introductory blog post!
See you on Wednesday,

Ariel