Hello internet, I am back.

After the longest break I have taken from work since 2011, I finally returned to work today.

The end of 2017 kind of broke me a bit. I was working across three continents, conference-marathoning, swimming in a pool of overdue deadlines, and feeling all sorts of fatigue especially after a few mishaps and unpleasant encounters over the year. As much as I genuinely love my work, I was overloaded and exhausted.

And so I decided to drop everything to recuperate and spend time doing the things I love. It has been a good three weeks road-tripping around WA, bingeing on fiction and novels unrelated to work, vegetating on Netflix, decorating the house, and hanging out with my loved ones. It felt foreign but nice. And here I am, rested and ready to conquer 2018.

This year I am going to be writing a lot. More specifically, I am going to prioritise writing for my own projects rather than spreading myself thin across writing for others’ edited collections and books. In fact, if all goes well, I will be submitting at least four books before the year is up. I really enjoy writing and am excited to finally be wrapping up these projects in a milestone text. So thus begins my Year of the Books.

2016: Year of the Fieldwork
2017: Year of the Talks
2018: Year of the Books
2019: Year of the Grants/Salary/Jobs pls pls pretty pls?

Wish me luck!

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I secretly have a 2018 resolution but it feels so unfeasible and unattainable and unrealistic that I haven’t admitted to it or dared to announce it.

Instead, I came up with five other resolutions that I can keep to.

1) I want to spend more time with people in homes – ours or theirs, whether I’m at home or traveling the world for work. I miss domesticity.