When you are a parent of school-age children the year divides itself automatically into term-sized chunks, and the winter break has always been my favourite. Not only because of Christmas, which fills our house with magic, but because the whole world seems to stop for two weeks. The phone doesn’t ring, there are no meetings to go to, and emails stop pouring into your inbox. It is a proper holiday. A self-confessed workaholic, if I know there is an email waiting for my attention, I am incapable of leaving it unanswered. I have stopped putting on an out-of-office message, as I am forever undermining ‘I will reply to your email on my return’ with an immediate response. But for the last fortnight it has all taken a back seat, and I am returning to work refreshed and recharged.
The year is full of promise. Although the paperback version of my novel won’t be on the shelves till April next year, review copies will go out this year, and the e-book goes on sale in October. The coming months will see the final edits on the manuscript, the cover design, and the audio recording – all tremendously exciting. In the meantime I will be starting work on book two.
April sees the third year of the literary festival I co-founded, so the pace is already picking up to make sure the sixty-or-so events are publicised, tickets sold, and authors looked after. It’s a time-consuming project but an immensely rewarding one.
I’m never happy without a new challenge, so this year I will be putting in place the action plan drawn up as a result of December’s amazing BBC Women in Radio event. I’ll be kicking off with a review of the Sunday papers on BBC Oxford this weekend (12 Jan) so do tune in if you’re around.
I hope you had a wonderful Christmas, and that 2014 brings you all you could wish for.