Quote for the New Year:
New Year’s Day. A fresh start. A new chapter in life waiting to be written. New questions to be asked, embraced, and loved. Answers to be discovered and then lived in this transformative year of delight and self-discovery. Today carve out a quiet interlude for yourself in which to dream, pen in hand. Only dreams give birth to change. ~ Sarah Ban Breathnach
Last day of the year….kind of crazy how quickly the past few months time flew by.
Today, I spent the majority of my day planning for 2019. Not making resolutions, mind you, but planning.
Resolutions are to be broken. Goals/plans are to be achieved. Says who, you may ask? Says me…or at least this has been my experience.
So today, I put together a list of my business goals and personal goals for the coming year — things I hope to accomplish in my professional and personal life — and then I scheduled it all on my calendar (faithfully adhering to my “calendar-based productivity system”). So it looks as though 2019 is going to be “the year of writing’ for me as I have many, many books planned, some fiction, some non-fiction, and some courseware (though these are better classified as manuals rather than books — 400-page manuals mind you, but still manuals nonetheless).
And several video courses too. But these will be for techie stuff like Lightroom and Photoshop.
Speaking of books, one of my fiction books will be published in January (fingers crossed). This would be Book 4 in my Ghost Oracle series in which Nick once again gets himself in a whole heap of trouble. Huh…I just realized that I don’t have a title for the book yet. I guess I better get on that.
Book 5 is also nearly half written so you should be seeing this one pop up in the coming months.
Oh — and there is also a new series that I’m working on that will hopefully see the light of day this year (But shhh! It’s a secret!).
Some of the stuff I’m planning for the coming year was stuff that I should have done in 2018. But two surgeries delayed me a tad and pushed me off schedule. A lot. But now I’m back on track and ready to face 2019 with optimism (and no surgeries!).
What are your goals for 2019?
Back when I was writing up book reviews on this blog, I posted several times a week. But ever since I moved my book reviews over to rogersreads.com, I inadvertently stopped posting over here completely. I guess I didn’t realize how much book reviews made up this blog.
So one of my goals for the new year (always goals, never resolutions), is to post regularly on this blog. Maybe even daily. Now wouldn’t that be something? I remember a couple years back author Austin Kleon stated that as a goal, he was going to publish a blog post every day for an entire year. And he did. As far as I know, he’s still doing it. So I thought, what the hell. I’m going to give it a try too and bring my languishing author blog back to life.
So the goal is to publish one post here every day. It may be a lengthy post, a book-related post, a movie review, a tidbit of interesting news, an inspirational or humorous quote or simply an image but I’m going to post something here every day. Well, that’s the goal anyway. Truth be told, I shouldn’t have too much difficulty accomplishing this given that I’ve maintained a daily journaling habit since 1980.
So this here’s my post for today. See you tomorrow!
For those of you who’ve been following me for awhile, you’ll know that I had posted quite a few book reviews to this blog. A lot actually. Several a week.
The thing of it is, is that I didn’t intended this to be a book review blog…it just kind of happened.
My original intention with my rogerhyttien.com blog was to be a place where I talk about my work and talk about me a bit, offering you the chance to get to know me better. But then I started writing reviews (I couldn’t help myself…I love books!).
I also have a BookTube channel called Roger’s Reads in where I talk about books. So I asked myself,
“Hey Roger! Why don’t so start a separate book reivew blog and call it Roger’s Reads?”
So I said, “Hey Roger, that’s a great idea.”
So Roger’s Reads – the blog was born. I moved all the book reviews that were here over to there and from this point forward, will only post my reviews there. If you click on the Book Reviews link on top of this page, it will take you right over there. Or you can go to https://rogersreads.com.
So this blog is going to mainly be about my work, my life and things I like (and dislike). I hope you’ll stick around.
But if you’re just here for the reviews, then rogersreads.com is the place to be.
I just started watching a new series on Netflix called Altered Carbon. This is an adaptation of a cyberpunk science fiction novel written in 2002 by Richard K. Morgan. I read the novel about 15 years ago, and it was one of those stories that stuck in my head. I was super-pumped when I heard that the book was finally going to be made into a series. It’s a Netflix original, so that’s the only way to watch it at the moment.
I’ve watched only the first three episodes and thus far, I love it! The story takes place in a future world where human personalities can be stored digitally and downloaded into new bodies (the new bodies are referred to as “sleeves”).
Of course, the more money you have, the better body (sleeve) you can obtain.
Most people have implants in their spinal columns called “stacks” which store all their memories. If their body dies, their “stack” can be stored indefinitely and then implanted into a new body. If your stack is somehow damaged, you’re dead for good. However, the very rich are able to keep backup copies of their stacks in remote storage, which they update regularly. This way, even if their stack is somehow destroyed, they can be “resleeved”.
The story revolves around our hero, Takeshi Kovacs (played by Joel Kinnaman), an accused terrorist who’s been “on ice” for the past 250 years and has now been revived in a new body. He was brought back (resleeved) in order to find the murderer of a very, very rich man named Laurens Bancroft. It was believed that Laurens Bancroft committed suicide, but the recently revived Bancroft believes that he was murdered, and has hired Kovacs in the hope that Kovacs will find his killer.
…and thus the story begins.
I’m definitely looking forward to watching the next seven episodes in this series (the first season consists of 10 episodes). I think this is a great start to the series and can’t wait to see where they’re going to go with it. If enjoy cyberpunk, science fiction or dystopian stories and are a Netflix subscriber, you might want to check out Altered Carbon.
Or you can check out the original novel HERE
I had a good chuckle today. I got an e-mail from someone asking me if I was using my real name or if I was blogging and publishing under a pseudonym. Believe me, if I was choosing to write under a pen name, I would have chosen a much easier name to pronounce and spell than “Hyttinen”
So yup. Roger Hyttinen is my real name. At one time I considered writing under a pen name but changed my mind — nothing beats the feeling of seeing your own name on your books.