The Ninth of January

Today, in my humble opinion, is the worst day of the year.

The ninth of January signifies the end of anything worth waiting for until Easter, which isn't quite the big occasion it used to be either.

Christmas, the highlight of winter, is now yesterday's wrapping paper. New Year has passed in a bleary-eyed haze of forgotten resolutions and hangover cures, (in fact it didn’t this year as I wasn’t drinking!) And my birthday, that last bastion of winter time happiness is now, but for the Amazon orders, all but over.

Officially a year older and thus closer to the grave, I now stand on the verge of the most depressing quarter of the year, January, February, March.

And oh, how I despise it.

The weather, which is almost always unforgiving around this time, is magnified in its misery by the post-Yuletide downer.

Work, the necessary evil that perniciously bores into your soul and thus takes over 90% of your thought processes, is made so much harder by the weather. Any chance of good will is crushed as miserable co-workers sullenly growl their greetings, polluting the atmosphere with their despondency; and who can blame them? One can’t help but be down when the start of the day involves a journey that could mirror a movie scene about Scott of the Antarctic or Noah’s Ark?

Then the ruinous January bills from the year before arrive to plunder your bank account, and in among this melancholy and wretchedness is you, struggling to master the usual day to day runnings of life.

Depressing isn’t it?

Well, this year I’ve decided to take the bull by the horns and lose my midwinter blues in a frenzy of writing. Three unfinished manuscripts sit before me, panting to be petted by my keyboard dancing fingers, and I'm not going to disappoint them. The goal for 2015 is to finish all three and hopefully have them out in 2016.

So, I can categorically state that there’ll be no fresh novels from myself this year, but 2016 will see three being put out, either with a publisher or on my own.

There, I’ve said it and I can’t take it back!

Bring 2015 on!!

Is it summer yet…?

All the best for 2015.

Reg.

As you were.