New year, new blog post

Happy new year, everyone!

2021 is over, a year that somehow felt both three days and seven hundred years long. It would have been nice to have done a bit of reflecting on 2021 because despite its many challenges (*cries in homeschooling*), it was actually a pretty good year for my business. I had some great opportunities, got to work with some lovely new clients, said no to things that weren’t right for me without a moment’s hesitation, had a viral tweet, sold some copies of my books, and finally managed to get my visual rebrand done after about two years of thinking about it. So I probably should have set aside some time to take stock and think about what I’ve learned and how I can take that forward and blah blah blah, but I haven’t, and I’m not sure I will now, and I know for sure that one of those things I’ve learned is that there’s no point fretting about the things you didn’t get a chance to do, so hey ho.

So onwards and upwards into 2022. At some point, I’m sure I will put aside some of that elusive “time” stuff I mentioned to think about some proper goals for this year and a strategy for how to achieve them, but that will have to wait until I’ve deleted all these emails from HMRC reminding me I haven’t yet done my tax return. And I suppose I should probably do the tax return too. (Next year, I won’t leave it until January. Promise. (Who am I kidding?))

But for now, a resolution. I know, I’ve written before about how I shouldn’t make resolutions because I always break them. But even when I try not to make them explicit, somewhere inside I’m still telling myself that this will be the year that I’ll [long list of things I want to start and stop doing that will magically make me one of those super-inspiring people that everyone wants to be]. This year, I’m finally wise enough to realise that that list is only setting me up for failure. This year, I’m going to start with just one thing – read more books.

This is, obviously, because reading books is awesome and also something a professional fiction editor should be doing all the time. But it’s quite hard, sometimes, to spend all day searching out the errors in a story and then try to make your brain stop doing that when you want to read for pleasure. Reading can become frustrating, and if I want to spend my spare time doing something frustrating, I’ll go and have another argument with my children about their strange compulsion to leave socks everywhere but in their sock drawer or on their feet. So then I get in a mood with reading, and I go on Twitter, which can be even more frustrating than the sock thing.

But once I find a great, well edited book, I fall in love with reading all over again, and it makes me happy. I then want to spend more time reading, which keeps me off social media, which does wonders for my energy levels, which in turn makes most areas of my life a bit better. Hopefully that one little change – read more books – can make a big difference. And if it doesn’t, ah well – at least I will have read more books.

Now the only question is what to read first…?