This is exciting on many levels, not least of which is that in 43 days, I’ll be entering the UK for a glorious five months. Already, so much of significance has happened in 2009 – Solace and Grief being accepted for publication, joining the excellent SuperNova writing group, planning our trip – that part of me finds it hard to believe how much else is yet to come. Tomorrow, for instance, I’ll be meeting my publisher at Ford Street, Paul Collins, face-to-face for the first time. Later this month, I’ll be attending my first ever event as a writer, the Pan Macmillan winter sales conference, about which I am both exhilirated and nervous. Once we’re in the UK, Toby and I will have our second wedding anniversary in Bristol; we’ll be in Scotland for winter and Surry for Christmas, which will be a new experience for both of us. I’ve started writing short stories, which is a new and fascinating thing – not that they’re brilliant so far, but I’m working on it, and the more I write them, the more confident I feel. Perhaps that’s why I’ve been blogging less: my strange ideas are ending up in stories rather than expository posts, refracted through a fictitious lens instead of a journalistic one.

I’m loving 2009. My only worry is that so much will have happened by December 31 that the sheer volume of significance will cause a mental implosion – that it will be too hard to remember each little thing, and so I’ll forget everything instead, swept away by the Big Event of 2010, which will be the book release itself. But at least I’ll be able to use my blog as a reminder. After all, that’s part of why it’s here.