On My 2026 Bingo Card
A new year typically means a new resolution or new set of goals, both in my personal and creative lives. Up until the last few years, I didn’t really care about setting a resolution. Then, post-undergrad and away from the syllabuses and objectives set for me, I realized I enjoyed coming up with my own structure (my own syllabus, in other words) and identifying what it is I want to work towards over the course of a year. There’ve been times when I’ve picked a defining word I hope to live out or explore, too, and that’s been helpful in the past to increase my intentionality.
This year I’m doing something new (to me) that I saw some other folks do in 2025, which is a 2026 Bingo Card. My husband and I had ourselves a Bingo date where we created our card templates on Canva, filled them in, and then shared them with each other. Some of our squares were similar, and it was fun to see where we were more individualized.
I thought I’d share a few—there are 25 squares in all—with you here, a mix of creative goals and personal-interest ones. Some of them may seem random and some of them more obvious, and I like that that’s how life is. That’s how I want my year to be. I want the coming months to be full of the joyfully unexpected and the unfolding of aspirations I’m actively working toward. There’s such a thing as planning too much, as trying to control too much, so, while I’ve got my eye on clear objectives, I hope to remain open to whatever this year brings.
But let’s get into some of the Bingo squares!
Learn how to make pasta.
This is, clearly, a departure from writing, blogging, podcasting, and whatever else I’m doing on this website. Something about me, though, is that, as a proper adult, I’ve been working on building my culinary repertoire, and I want to give homemade pasta a go. Last year, I challenged myself to try one new, Mediterranean recipe a month, and it introduced us to meals that are now some of our favorites.
Something else about me is that, historically, I haven’t enjoyed the cooking process. What I enjoy is feeding my husband good food. I enjoy preparing a good meal for friends. When it’s just me for dinner, I tend to throw together a sandwich or a bowl of cereal and that’s that. Challenging myself to try new recipes is just one way I motivate myself to spend time in the kitchen.
2. Query agents 15 times.
Now we’re getting around to a writing-related goal, and this was an easy one for me to pick out. Over the last year, it’s been on my mind more and more about being intentional about querying my finished manuscripts. I reached out to a few agents last year, but I haven’t been diligent with this effort in recent years like I was when I was fresh out of undergrad and had more energy and excitement for it.
Most queries result in rejection, and they don’t call it the “querying trenches” for nothing. The odds of getting a positive response from an agent are low, and you spend a lot of time waiting because oftentimes you only receive an automated message saying your query has been received and then silence. There are so many agents I’ve never heard a single thing back from, which is just how things go sometimes.
Until I decide to pivot and publish my stories independently, I’ve got to keep giving this querying game a shot. So, here’s to contacting more agents in 2026!
3. Volunteer 20 times.
It’s been on my heart to get back to regularly volunteering, which I did when I lived in St. Louis but found challenging to do in Germany. My faith instructs me that serving my community is important and necessary, and I want to live into that. Thankfully, my schedule right now is flexible, and the local food shelf is only a minute or two down the road. Boysy and I were able to get one volunteering shift in before the holidays and end-of-year timing chaos, and I know we’re both looking forward to doing more in the coming year.
4. Scrapbook Germany memories.
This will definitely be an activity that takes time because I have a lot of pictures to sort through and creating just a one-page spread always takes longer than I think it will. For me, scrapbooking is one of those time-warp hobbies. I sit down at ten in the morning to put down a few photos for one memory, figure out how to arrange it and make it cute with little extra stickers or what have you, and next thing I know it’s noon and I’ve spent two hours doing it.
To be fair, I can’t really complain because it’s lovely to have hobbies that make you forget that time is passing. And scrapbooking and documenting life somewhere other than on a screen has become increasingly important to me. I hate how photos just seem to live on social media now. We back things up on the Cloud, but what about making prints and putting together a photo album? As a kid, I loved flipping through the albums we had on our shelves or rifling through the photo box that was full of everything from when I was a kid to when my mom was a kid. I love that kind of stuff.
So, the obvious scrapbooking I have to do is from our recent year abroad, but the sentiment is also to document life in a physical way because our memories should live in the real-world too and not just in the digital one. Take this as your sign, if you need one, to make your own albums or scrapbook. Our photos and creativity belong to us, and whatever you make doesn’t have to see the light of Instagram to capture the joy of the memories you make.
5. Finish Pirate Tales
It’s been a minute since I finished an entire manuscript, and I’ve set my sights on finishing my Pirate Tales. There will be ten stories total, and I have six and half drafted right now. I’m diving back into Tale No. 7 this month, which I’m both excited and nervous about. Excited because I haven’t really looked at it since the beginning of November, and nervous because I’d hit a bit of a wall with it. My hunch is that happened because I was exhausted from our big move and travels home. In general, I was feeling rather worn-down at the end of 2025, when it came to my writing projects, so I pretty much took the whole of December off. Now that I’ve rested, I hope I’ll be able to get back into my Tales and have all ten drafted before too long.
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Wish me luck for these (and the 20 other!) goals I’ve set, and I’ll send some back your way. I hope this new year gives you all the energy, ambition, rest, and resources to pursue your projects and be delighted by the unexpected.
Have yourself a good week, friend, and I’ll catch you back here soon!