Christmas, and beyond...

So, Christmas is almost here, and with it my last blog post of 2024. Merry holidays in general to all. Also, if anyone reading this wants some sci-fi reading, you can not only potentially try my work The Cluster Cycle, (free online samples from each book here and here), but also help support the work of many talented writers including Juliet E. McKenna, Jendia Gammon, Gareth L. Powell, Emily Inkpen, and Tej Turner. Just to name a very few.

But...what comes in 2025. It's now been just a little over a year since my traditional debut, and it has been a wild year. Both personally, and on a global scale. And the next year looks like it's going to be giving 2023-2024 a run for its money for some of the crazier years in world history. I didn't need all this new dark sci-fi speculative material, I really didn't. Good things have happened, pushback has been seen against some of the daftest decisions, but there has also been insanity and cruelty and vanity doing its best to send our people and planet spiraling into terminal chaos.

I also needed to overcome a great big stinking chunk of writer's block that had been infesting me since my debut, a creeping and horrible sense of "I'm never going to write anything descent ever again, so what's the point?" I had to go back and think of something I truly, deeply loved writing within to get a project completed. I've also been going through the first parts of my Open University degree, a BA in English Language and Literature to bolster my possibilities of getting a day job. You know, what authors need if they're not going to be the stereotypical starving dependents in garrets. Except today, garrets are getting pretty expensive too.

I'm in a good position. I've got support, friends, and a publisher (Roan & Weatherford, in case anyone was wondering) who seems to be with me for the long haul. I've also been getting a better grip on my mental health, and as I go into my thirty-first year of existence in this world, I can try to find simple pleasures in things like repairs, education, writing what I really want to write and doing it in a readable way. I also need to remember to actually READ. And I'm counting audiobooks in this too, since one can absorb great literature through one's ears these days.

So yeah. I'm hoping I'll enjoy my upcoming holidays, both with family visiting and after that my first overseas trip to see an exhibition of Yoshitaka Amano in Milan. And when I return in the new year, I hope I shall have some fresh eyes and perspective with which to attack 2025 with what I know I have when I get my head the right way round: verve, humour, and common sense.