Happy New Year to all.  I hope you had a great Christmas.  How many of you made New Year’s resolutions? After checking on last year’s resolutions it was clear I failed on pretty much all of them, except one – spending less!  But I tried hard, well at least for the first few weeks before life took over and things became a task of just surviving.  So this year I’m taking it easy on the resolutions, I’m going to continue the work in progress, those that weren’t met last year;

1. do something for someone else and give a sincere complement daily;
2. work on my writing to give others’ pleasure at least once a week;
3. let my family and friends (and puppy dogs) know regularly how much they mean to me;
4. get out of breath and sweaty once a day;

and because I’m in a very happy relationship and want to keep it that way,

5. do at least one thing a day with my husband and tell him I love him.

However, my main one (number 6) is to change my workplace, preferably to somewhere which will involve more writing.  Already I have been accepted as an author on a new blog site My Trending Stories, where I’ll write about writing, well actually I’m going to cheat and re post my earlier posts from this site.

In the mean-time the editing is coming along, slowly.  I’m concentrating on completing the second edit on my adult novel before I complete the edit on the blog book.

A lesson I have learnt over the past year;

‘Don’t start more than one project at a once.’

Emily Maguire warned me and with good reason.  However, it is proving to be difficult to not start the next blog book, I have had so many ideas for characters and plot but all I’m doing is keeping notes until I can start.

One of the latest books I have enjoyed, recently, was Black Rock White City, by A S Patric, which won the Miles Franklin Award.  It is a book about a refugee couple from Bosnia adjusting to life in Australia and how they cope with the atrocities they witnessed and survived in their home land.  The book is a mystery/thriller, the suspense created by the villain, Dr. Graffiti, and a love story between Jovan, (the protagonist) and his wife Suzana.  What impressed most was the way Patric was able to weave the characters’ recollections into the narrative, seamlessly, giving a sense of the characters without the usual telling.  He used a technique where the characters would come into contact with common objects which then jars a memory, unbidden into the psyche;

“He leans over the top of his first Australian car, feeling the heat of the roof radiating through his arms and drifts into poetry;

The air that breathes me, the air that moves my life, that evaporates my soul, the air that kisses me and kisses me, the air breathing in the bliss of my longest exhalation …….”

There are also some beautiful sentences, thanks to the fact that Jovan was a published poet in his native Bosnia.

This book certainly inspired me to consider how to include emotions in my own writing.

Definitely a book to put on your reading list.