Bucket List Challenge - what will I cross off?

I came across the Bucket List Blog Hop Challenge the other day and decided it might be a good way to break some writer's block, and it sounded like fun.

The question that we have to answer is What will you cross off your Bucket List in 2013? At first I thought to myself, well I don't really have a bucket list so I'll give that a miss. But then I was thinking about it and although I may not have a defined bucket list of all of the things I want to do there are certainly a few things that I know, and two of them will be crossed off this year.

The easy one first, well for me
I've mentioned a little bit about this throughout the time I've been writing the blog, but a couple of years ago my partner Derek and I moved from New South Wales to Tasmania. This was the culmination of a five year plan to change our lives and remove some of the stresses that we were experiencing in career/lifestyle. It was also to allow us to achieve the goal of having a bigger piece of land and designing/building our own home.

With the help of a great designer down here we are building our dream home, a strawbale house overlooking the Huon Valley. Derek has not had paid employment since we moved in 2010 to do the majority of the building himself. This has meant that we have missed three deadlines to date (yes we are avid Grand Designs watchers and should have known better), but we will be in the house this year, even if it is not entirely finished.

So this year I will cross off living in a beautiful house that has been designed to support the way we want to live. Added to that will be having my own library, which is extremely exciting.

And of course the book
The second one is probably the more obvious one to anyone who has been reading the blog. That is that this year I will write and publish a book. You could sort of say that I did this with my Do-Pad but I don't really consider that a book, given that there is not a lot of writing in it :-)

Laying everything out on the line here, I have always wanted to write a book and have it published, for as long as I can remember. I've mentioned in the blog that I never really had a good idea about what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I can honestly say there is a part of me that always wanted to be an author. It's just that this never seemed like an option, which is why I just put it to one side and until now I never really pursued it in any tangible way. For the longest time this was going to be a novel but I would always stumble over this and I think that my negative internal voice was too strong for this, that just seemed to unobtainable.

Then, when I came across the Year of TED concept something clicked for me. Maybe it was remembering AJ Jacobs' The Year of Living Biblically, which was one of the concept talks for the project, or maybe it was the fact that I was going to be writing about the whole experience through the blog anyway. Either way, this became a very tangible way for me to finally write a book, and with social media the way it is I will self-publish if I have to.

So this year I will finish and publish a book, and become an author (note the omission of the word successful from this sentence, one thing at a time).