Welcome to this year’s Book Bingo Reading Challenge! The challenge was a big hit last year, and we’ve made a few changes this year to make it work even better.

The Scoreboard:

The rules:

1. Be awesome. If you’re not, this isn’t going to work.
2. The challenge runs from January 1 to December 31, 2014.
3. If you want to participate, you can join in any time of the year! Feel free to write up a blog post with the rules linking back to my and Anne’s blog in your sign-up post. You can add your post to the Linky at the end of this post!
4. If you read one book for the “1 book” in any category, you can’t change it later on when you read another book to “2 books.” Once a square is crossed off, it’s crossed off for good! (Feel free to print off the scoreboard to keep track!)
5. Books read for one square are for that square ONLY and cannot be counted towards another category. This is all about reading ALL THE BOOKS.
6. The FREE SQUARES are a little different this year — now you can use those squares to read ANY book you like of any genre! Woo!
7. You can start your board over again, but ONLY if you receive the stamp of awesome by completing a blackout. The “winners” of the challenge will be the ones who achieve the most winning combinations by the end of 2014.
8. You can feel free to post your reading list for each category, though it’s not a requirement.
9. Having a blog or writing reviews for books read is not required. So long as you want to have fun, you can participate!
10. Every 3 months I will post an update here and all participants can link to their own updates. An update post will go up April 1st, July 1st, October 1st, and December 31st.
11. This isn’t a race, but don’t be afraid to rub your reads in the other player’s face. This will be seen as encouragement. Feel free to use the hashtag #BookBingo2014 on Twitter!

Ways to Win:

The  sign up linky is on Kristilyn’s blog, so head on over and sign up to join us!

It’s a new year! The last one positively flew by, didn’t it? It’s taking me a little longer than I thought to get things up and running again – I left kind of a big mess after moving hosts. I had no idea just how big, or how long it would take me to fix it. I am chipping away at it, and I still have another week until school starts. I will get it done!

A new year means a new beginning here on Creativity’s Corner. Personally, in 2014, my goals are balance and positivity. With that in mind, I’ve written some new guidelines for myself and the blog.

Balance:

• Each week I will limit myself to one post. Conversely, I will allow myself one post a week unless my workload for the week is absolutely 100% prohibitive. This means I WILL SET ASIDE TIME TO BLOG EACH AND EVERY WEEK.
• I will set lower goals. Previous years I challenged myself to read more than I ever had before. This year I choose a smaller goal, a mere 100 books. I hope this means I won’t feel guilty when I don’t have as much time to read (or rather, when I’m reading something like 600 pages/week of academic literature and don’t feel like reading anything else).
• I will print out and participate in the 2014 Book Bingo Challenge (official post coming soon), but I will only challenge myself to complete one “special” win. No need to add pressure.

Positivity:

• In an effort to be more positive, I will only be devoting full reviews to books that I enjoy. That was the original intention of the blog after all – to discuss the books I love. I will continue to mark all books read on GoodReads, and each month I will do a round-up post including all of the books I read.

This new set of guidelines probably mean that some of the non-review posts, like discussions, will be cut back quite a bit. BUT, they should also mean that I will be able to post semi-regularly at least.

What are your goals for 2014?