Monday 14 January 2008

Crossed off the list!

Well friends, I did not make the shortlist for the RNA Romantic Novel of the Year. The writers who did make are all excellent and very deserving and I was honestly so pleased to be on the long list in the first place.

I really feel it is an important award because it is the only one that recognises that writers of popular fiction and yes, even romantic fiction, put as much care and devotion into their work with just as much skill and talent as the far more widely critically recognised writers of literary fiction do. So Good luck to all on the shortlist from me.

Tuesday 8 January 2008

Roll on Hot Cross Buns

Well another Christmas has been tidied away, a surplus of chocolates and mince pies have been hefted on to high shelf and I have solemnly promised that I will not be getting the step ladder out to reach them (starting tomorrow.....) I find it such an odd time of year, everyone determined to be jolly and love each other when really actually its perhaps the most fiercely difficult time.

Especially if one is allergic to Christmas Trees.

Anyway I'm looking forward to the Spring. I'm a Spring kind of person. I like days with blues skies but a chill in the air, that kind of crisp new day freshness that puts syncopation in your step and make you dream of the heat of the summer. Which is curious really because I don't like hot summers. I get terrible heat rash. Which is why I've always thought I'd like to live in Switzerland.

I have not made resolutions, except I have committed myself to running a half marathon. Me! Thirteen odd miles, the woman who gets puffed out climbing the step ladder to reach the chocs on the high shelf. OK I exaggerate a little. I do, or rather have run, quite regularly for the last year, but never further than six miles. Everyone assures me that running 13 of them will be like a piece of cake but I am fairly certain it won't be. I can probably say for sure right now that there will be no butter icing and liberal dollops of jam involved. I think there will be pain, probably, wobbly legs definitely and a great deal of coming last. But I don't mind if I come last as long as I finish it.

I don't really know why I want to do it, I'm not a sports kind of girl normally. Normally I'm a high heeled sequined detail kind of girl but I was once on the school cross country B team when I was about eleven and it wasn't my speed that won me the place nor even my stamina but simply my determination never to stop. And that is how I am going to attack the half marathon and indeed this year. I shall keep going and do my best.

After all, what else can anyone do?