TOP TEN TUESDAY: Ten resolutions for 2016

(Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and The Bookish!)

The useful thing about this week's Top Ten Tuesday is that I actually have 10 New Year's resolutions this year (I know, go hard or go home!) and by proclaiming them to the world, hopefully it'll be a lot easier for me to commit to them and succeed with my personal challenges.
Some of these challenges are bookish, some of them are just related to my personal life, but all of them are things that I'm definitely going to try to complete in 2016.

10) Continue blogging

Duh. 

I don't even know if I need to go into this one, but I will admit that there have been times over the past few months where I've wavered. You can quite blatantly see it, based on my post activity: it was Top Ten Tuesday, Top Five Wednesday, Friday Playlist, Top Ten Tuesday, etc. etc. without any other content. I was slowly losing the will to live.

But that will is back (I mean, look at how many things I've posted this week! Aren't I great?) and I'm going to make more effort in 2016 to come up with more unique things for my blog. 

9) Get better at replying to emails

You'd think it wouldn't be that difficult, running quite a small blog, but I still get review requests from authors that I will read, plan a reply to... And then realise that I haven't sent the reply three months later. It gives me anxiety, because I don't want to let anyone down: it's something I need to focus on. 

8) Catch up on my NetGalley reading

For quite a while I wasn't missing any release dates on NetGalley, but over the last six months I've fallen horrendously behind. I'm not going to miss any release dates this year (yet... It will happen eventually!) so hopefully I'll also be able to catch up on some of the older titles that slipped through my reading net. 

7) ...and catch up with bookbridgr too

bookbridgr is similar to NetGalley, in that you request titles to review, but these are physical copies that get sent through to you. I was good at bookbridgr (for like a week) but now I have quite a few review copies that I need to get through. The guilt is too overpowering. 

6) Exercise five hours a week

Sometimes I am a sedentary person. Over Christmas I have been literally glued to my sofa. But I still make sure to complete five hours of exercise a week, because it means that I don't get too complacent. Even if it just means taking the stairs a few extra times at work, or walking to the bus stop further away from my house, it all adds up. 

5) Be happy

2015 was an awesome year for me. I got another job, I read some brilliant books, I reconnected with friends that I'd drifted apart from and I started a wonderful relationship (which is still very new and I'm probably cursing by announcing on the internet... No matter!).
I want 2016 to be as happy as last year, so I'm going to focus on keeping myself calm and relaxed, not getting stressed out about any of the silly things in life and just generally staying positive. 

4) Complete all of my reading challenges

This year, I've set myself a personal challenge to complete a series every month, but I'm also participating in the Goodreads challenge (with a starting goal of 100 books) and the classics challenge, in which I will attempt to read a classic every month. 

I'm probably not going to complete the A-Z reading challenge this year, because I completed that in 2015, but hopefully the classics challenge will do a good enough job of broadening my reading horizons. 

3) Drink a bottle of water every day

Sometimes, I forget to drink. It sounds really ridiculous, but did you know that sometimes the reason people snack is because they confuse their thirstiness for hungriness? I'm going to make sure to up my liquid intake, to stay hydrated and healthy. 

2) Stay vegetarian

I love being a vegetarian. It makes me more conscientious of the things that I'm eating, it makes me try things that I would never have tried before, and it was the first New Year's resolution that I ever succeeded at doing. This will be my fourth year as a vegetarian.

1) Become more active in the YA community

I check Twitter constantly. Like, all of the time. But I'm not that active on it myself. I see things that I think are funny, or debates that are intriguing that I really want to get involved in, but I just watch everyone else make their contributions and I never feel brave enough to add my own. So this year, I want to be really, really good at being a part of the community: I've only joined in with #UKYAchat a couple of times, but I'm going to be active in all of them! I'm going to comment on more people's blog posts, and I'm going to broaden the horizons of blogs that I read.

This is definitely my most difficult resolution, because I hate shouting into the void and not knowing if I'm going to get any replies back... But I do that fairly frequently on my blog, so I just need to take the bravery I exhibit here and smush it down into 140 characters.

So this is my Top Ten Tuesday! What resolutions are you attempting? Do you think you'll join me in any of mine?