Happy New Year! 🙂

2020 is here! Yay!

2019 has come and gone, and what a year it was!

I celebrated my fifth blogging anniversary. 🙂

Said celebration involved the 30-Day (or 30-Week, in my case) Anime Pick 5 Challenge! That was loads of fun to do, frequent YouTube challenges notwithstanding.

I crowned that with the long-promised Anime Countdown, also fun.

I didn’t quite manage to do all of the weekly reviews, of anime and other titles, which I had hoped to, alas, but I got through most of them.

And I had a good amount of fun with a number of tags and miscellaneous fan-based discussions, not to mention my weekly quotes! 🙂

I more than crossed the threshold of 300 followers as well, which was very cool, especially considering 2019 brought in about a hundred and four of them. 😀

Have I mentioned how grateful I am to you, my wonderful audience, for reading and following this humble little blog of mine? Well, I am! Thank you! 😀

Less happily, 2019 also featured a number of rising tensions and upsets in Real Life which necessitate 2020 as a year of transformation, hopefully. These changes are such that, after five years of going strong, I am going to have make a few changes in my blogging behavior. Specifically: cutting back.

Let me make it clear: Merlin’s Musings is not, in any way, stopping. I just celebrated five years, and it was great! I am not stopping now! No way! 🙂

But, regrettably, I must slow down a bit. I find that I have less and less time to  work with, and more issues to deal with in real life, most especially in regards to supporting my family as it passes through a most trying experience. I also have increasing stresses of my own, regarding my real-life future and career, and if I am to find my way forward, I need to do something different.

One thing I am going to do different: I am going to try and finish – yes, to actually complete – one of the many ideas I have for a novel to write.

I’ll be keeping the details of said novel to myself for now, but it is my lifelong dream to become a published novelist. I’ve never finished any of my ideas, though, because 1) I’ve often been in need of a job and 2) I have just sucked at developing my ideas to a finishing point. So, doing this? It is a huge step for me, whether or not I get published (which I certainly hope I do!). Wish me luck!

That, of course, leaves even less time for blogging, and I have no idea how well I might juggle the two efforts.

I don’t know exactly how big the impact crater is going to be, but devoting the time to outlining and completing a novel obviously leaves less time for consuming and reviewing books, anime, and everything else. As for movies, I do still intend to catch some of the new releases, especially the following titles somewhere close to their respective opening weekends:

Mar. 27: Mulan (a Disney live-action remake that I am more excited for because it promises to not be either a bland redoing or have just a few superfluous additions, but a tale that, like Jungle Book, draws more on the original story as well as Disney’s animated take on said story)
May 1: Black Widow (undomesticated equines could not keep me from this one!)
June 5: Wonder Woman 1984 (I am eager for this one, too! Especially the mystery of Steve Trevor’s return!)
June 19: Soul (looks cute, I may or may not make it to this one)
Nov. 6: Eternals (intriiiiguing!)
Nov. 25: Raya and the Last Dragon (yes, this one, yes)

And somewhere in there will be the MCU’s first Disney+ series, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, due to come out this fall.

On that particular note, my old commentary section, This Week on TV, has steadily dwindled with the dropping, ending, or both, of nearly every show in my Weekly Lineup. The last one standing is Marvel’s Agents of Shield, which is ending this season. I intend to follow through with that one, to the end. But when it ends, so does my commentary, for the foreseeable future. I may come back to it at some point, and I rather hope to, but it won’t be very soon, alas.

There will always be a weekly post in Sunday’s Wisdom, I am determined, but everything else is getting severely trimmed.

But, on the other hand, I am introducing a brand new section, which I think I will entitle… My Own Work. It’s a fairly self-explanatory title 😉 but to elaborate, it will be where I post things I write like, say, poetry, short stories, or memoirs. You know, to keep the juices flowing, but with an occasional break from the grindstone, that sort of thing. It’ll certainly be interesting for me to introduce the world to my own work, instead of only commenting on everyone else’s. 🙂

So… I don’t know what sort of transformation this will really be, if I’ll come out like a butterfly or not, but, I am going to give my all, and I hope that you, my wonderful audience, will not be too badly disappointed in me. 😉

Once again, thank you!

Thank you very much! 😀