2015/2016

I like to use this limbo between Christmas and New Year to get organised for the year ahead, although the time tends to be taken up instead by a mad rush to fill in my tax return, an excess of sleep and biscuits, and more often than not by some sort of family emergency. This year one of the cats took his turn at being ill, although so far we hope this was caused by toothache and not by anything worse. I think the worst Christmas I can remember for this kind of thing was one Christmas Eve years ago when, with my son already on antibiotics for a throat infection, I had to take the car to our local garage for urgent repairs, got distracted and left the house keys on the car key-ring and had to go back for them by taxi after arriving on the door-step with my son, who by this time needed to go back to bed, to find we couldn’t get into the house. Later that day I went back for the car, drove it into our drive and said to my son with a sigh of relief, ‘That’s it, we’re not going out again until after Christmas’. We went into the house and I found one of the cats had suddenly developed a swollen ear since that morning so we had to take him to the vet to get his own dose of antibiotics.

Anyway, I’ve managed to write a draft plan for the new writing year. It has already acquired some squiggly bits and arrows indicating I’m not sure where things will fit in, but it hasn’t yet had the chance to become as messy as my 2015 plan, which didn’t justify even being called a plan by the time I had finished with it.

I have a vague memory of resolving at about this time last year not to write as much in 2015 as I had done in 2014, or maybe that was a previous year’s resolution. In any case I can’t say I’ve stuck to it. If nothing else, The Thing in the Notebook, which was unforeseen and unplanned, would have well and truly seen off that idea. There may be more Things in Notebooks but it might be that I have to find a new way to trick myself in the coming year.

I hope everyone reading this has a happy year in 2016. Thank you very much indeed to anyone who has read my books, and I hope you will continue to enjoy them for as long as I enjoy writing them.