Happy New Year all. I hope 2017 has started well for you.

It’s just after 1.30am on New Year’s day as I start this. No doubt it will be finished at some other point as, hopefully, I’ll finally get tired enough to fall asleep.

Another year has passed. As with any year, it was a mixed bag. There were many good things that happened, but there was some bad decision making that has lead to bigger, badder decisions being made than perhaps we’ve made in recent memory. Decisions that will impact everyone, not just those who made them. 2017 will, of course, be where we begin to feel the impact of those decisions in full.

In everyday life, when making decisions, there always seems to be the ability to rethink, to change your mind when more information comes to hand. It does not seem at this moment that the world will be allowed this luxury. But we can hope.

And that’s the great thing about the New Year. Despite being an arbitrary line in the temporal sand, psychologically the slate is swept clean. We’re allowed to hope for something better, that this year will be better than the last. We take stock, give ourselves a moment’s pause to assess things and change direction. Of course, as January progresses, reality sets in and things take a suspiciously familiar track. But for these few hours, we get the hope of a blank slate, a course yet to be written. And maybe, just maybe, we can just nudge things in a slightly better direction.

For me, with impending parenthood (a good decision of 2016), my year is very much going to be divided into two halves. From a writing perspective, the hope is to get out a novella and short story in the first half of the year and then use what time I have available in the second half of the year to edit The Vasini Chronicles II (I won’t make any promises yet on when that will see publication). From a personal perspective, the year (and all future years) are going to be written by my child. Who knows what they have in mind.

To do list for 2017

So here’s my to do list, as it stands, for 2017:

• Edit and publish a novella and short story
• Edit and try to work out how to publish a long novel
• Finish writing and then edit The Vasini Chronicles II
• Write some more things (not all of them Vasini related)
• Read at least 26 books and cut down my backlog of unread books (now over 300 thanks to Christmas presents)
• Hope that the bad decision making the world seemed prone to last year doesn’t have as much of an impact as it could and try to play my part in counteracting said bad decision making
• Become a father (at which point my to do list will likely be much longer and quite different from the above)

Some last little bits from 2016

1. In the end I managed to get through 61 books last year. I managed to complete The Secret History of Twin Peaks (along with sneaking in Sage Volume 4, Revolting Rhymes, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats and Jessica Jones: Alias Volume 1), but not Dragons of Summer Flames.
2. For those who may not have seen the link on Facebook or Twitter, The New Podler Review of Books reviewed The Silver Mask here.