New Year

It's that time of year to do a bit of planning and looking forward, as well as a little looking back.

This year I want to get more organised and rather than coming up with vague resolutions I'd like to have actual plans and goals in place for myself. I realise that I'm the kind of person who needs a structure in order to be effective, so I'm coming up with that at the moment. I'm hoping to be a bit more organised with blogging too, I enjoyed doing the Sandman reread earlier, but I think I could have planned it better. January might be a bit quiet in these parts while I get a few things sorted out.

Of course other people's plans aren't particularly interesting and a lot of what I've come up with so far is written in shorthand that only I'm meant to understand, so I won't be posting a list here. Instead I'm going to start positive and mention some good things that will be happening this year.

Girl at the End of the World
Fox Spirit Books are publishing a pair of anthologies early this year featuring female characters in apocalyptic short stories. My story 'The End of the Garden' will appear in the first volume, it's definitely not your usual end of the world story, it's narrated by a hedgehog for one thing. Both books will feature an impressive range of stories and I'm really interested to see what the talented folks on those lists have come up with.

Fox Pockets: Guardians
You may remember me mentioning Fox Pockets (the small but perfectly formed mini-anthologies from Fox Spirit Books) back in June when my flash fiction story was published in the first volume: Piracy. Since then the second volume, Shapeshifters, has been released, and very fine it is too. My story 'My Guardian's Guardian' is due to be published in the Guardians Fox Pocket later this year.


Loncon3
In August this year I shall be attending my first Worldcon, since its going to be happening in the country I live in. I didn't do many conventions in 2013, deciding to spend a bit of money on a holiday to Greece instead. I've heard mixed reports about recent Worldcons, but as they are run by different people in different locations and (this year) in a different country I'm going into Loncon3 expecting it to be its own event. A lot of friends are going, so if nothing else it'll be a good opportunity to catch up with people and hopefully make some new friends too.


Looking back at the resolutions I made last year.
The most successful resolution was get a new job, which I achieved in April and has been going pretty well since then.
Have more fun and be more creative are, in retrospect, well-intentioned and tricky to judge. I did have fun and was creative in 2013, but at this point I'm not sure if it was more than 2012. I think overall I felt better in 2013 than 2012, so I'm calling that a vague win.
Blog about TV more is a resolution that happened in an unexpected way. I unintentionally stopped blogging about books for about 6 months. This means that the percentage of TV posts compared to book posts went up, but not in the way I wanted.
I'm honestly not sure if I did get better at punctuation, sentence structure and grammar. I might have done but I don't feel that I put much effort into it so I cannot say that I achieved that resolution.