The Other "That Time of Year Again": Salutations, Aspirations and Pachyderm-Related Conflagrations

A daytime long haul flight in the most uncomfortable plane the devil could have devised - thanks a bunch Jetstar - while stuck next to a slumbering businessman with the sinuses of an asthmatic hippopotamus provided me with a good few hours to ponder life, literature and everything else that's important (which, now I think about it, isn't much). In many ways 2015 was a terrible one for me - I hardly did any writing, I read a paltry 122 books and I was pretty slack on this whole blogging caper. Thankfully, I had a great reset in Hawaii (yeah, yeah first world solutions to first world problems) so I've leapt in to 2016 with a side table stacked with excellent looking books and an eagerness to foist my opinion about them down your throats. I also bought some new notebooks and refilled the ink cartridge in my pen, but that's neither here nor there. I probably have the greatest collection of notebooks with only one page of writing that the world has ever seen.

Anyhoo... The last day of my trip was spent running from bookstore to bookstore (of which there are, sadly, not very many in Honolulu) hoping to snap up anything that had escaped my attention on the 4000 other visits I'd made while I was there and also offloading the stack of paperbacks I'd read and didn't want to schlep back. Bookoff agreed to buy all but one (something about water damage, apparently) so I did the only thing I could think to do: scribbled the blog address on the title page and left it on a bench outside Barnes & Noble. Here's hoping someone picked it up and followed the link.

If it was you, please let me know.

So, onto, 2016. I'm not going to list many aspirations. I'm happy to read a little less (apparently it's not a competition), write a bit more and just generally enjoy the year. That said, a few things I'd like to achieve:

1. One brick a month. That's any book longer than 400 pages.
2. Read outside my comfort zone: More genre novels, graphic fiction and, gasp, some non-fiction. I'm happy to take suggestions here.
3. At least one blog post a week.
4. Write the kids' book that's been doing backflips in my mind for the past few weeks.
5. Finish a draft of the book I've been working on for longer than I care to admit and which I am well over deadline to deliver.
6. And, yeah, I can buy the odd book online again...

Well, that ought to do me. Eight days and eight books in to the year, I'd say I'm off to a good start. Time to go brick hunting.