Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

We have entered 2024. My books are on sale until the fourth day of this year, just a quick reminder!

What are my objectives for this year?

1. Publish The Slaves and The Djinn/The Gardener and The Goddess/The Title of The Book by March 31^st, unless a delay caused by cover artist unavailability pushes the date out further.
2. Have the next book at at least (yes two ats in a row) this level of preparedness by the end of 2024, so March 2025 for my next publication date is realistic. This is a big challenge.
3. Be healthier, lose weight, improve measurable indices of my health. The eternal objectives, but ones that grow more teeth as you get older, and the bite of age grows stronger and potentially more limiting.

My objectives are tempered by my awareness of the ephemeralness of all things, most especially myself. So I have things that are not objectives, but awarenesses. Which is a crap way of having a secondary list of objectives. Oh yeah, I do have a fourth objective, which is to swear less in my day to day life.

What are my awarenesses this year?

1. Don’t take time or people for granted: none of us are here long, and what you think is important can be rendered meaningless by illness or death. Be aware of what really matters, and value it.
2. Extension of 1) Extend grace to my fellow travelers (I like two L’s in traveller, it’s a UK thing) and citizens. Life can be tough, we can get stuck in the trenches and lose sight of the sky. When we lose that bigger perspective we become short-sighted, short-tempered, and foolish, but that isn’t who we have to be. Regain the sky, breathe, and extricate yourself from the need to fight over details with folk who are, for one reason or another, stuck in the trenches and are unable or unwilling to look up.
3. All other awarenesses for me currently are kind of part of these two. I’m just adding this so I have two lists of three. Remember Go Placidly. Be mindful. Be thankful. Be 50 pounds lighter. No, wait, (is this a deliberate homonym attack – you decide!) that’s an objective. But I wanted three be’s too, so I’m leaving it. Maybe my true objective should be to be less lazy as a writer.

So, my friends, I extend to you all my warmest and most heartfelt wish that you and your loved ones flourish this year. The world is full of hardship, war, and pain. Cynicism rules, and wants us to swallow its bitter pill, and become less in the process. It wants us to bend our head, see only the mud and the muck: not the sky, only a screen. I hope you all find time this year to look up, see the sky, see each other, and be better friends to one another than you were before.

I’m a sentimental old shit sometimes.