New Year's Plans for 2025

Okay, here are my plans for 2025. No strict deadlines as I want as much of a stress free year as I am able to manifest.

Publishing Targets: 

Familiar should be published within the first half of the year. As I have already noted in my blog, this will be my 9th and final novel. I will still be writing, but will be sticking to more short-form work, such as guidebooks. 

Fiction-wise, I will be restricting myself to short stories for a future compilation of Christmas ghost stories. Going forward, I think one new addition to this project a year will keep my creative urges sufficiently fed. I am currently undecided on when the writing of these ghost stories will commence this. The Christmas of 2026 will probably see the first one see light of day, given the the heavy stack of projects I have already piled up for 2025. 

My x4 Explore Gower titles will each get updated this next year for their second editions.

Whilst on the topic of updates, both Avalon and my Guy N Smith zine will get significant updates. Probable publishing dates for these latter x2 projects is mid 2025. 

I will also be publishing a 2nd Guy N Smith zine in May/June next year. I'm not sure what I will be personally contributing to the book, other than collating its content. We'll see. The project will only get released though if enough contributors come forward and if the combined effort will make Guy's family proud of what he inspired in others. His memory deserves our best efforts. For any Guy fans reading this, please send me your contributions as early as you can over the next month or two. 

Oh, and look out for a new professional website to advertise my wares sometime soon... 

Pastimes: 

 

As my regular blog and socials readers will already know, I have a new hobby lined up for next year - one specifically designed to get me out into the world a little more - Magnet Fishing. For anyone not aware of how exciting this hobby can be, check out this guy's magnetic adventures on Youtube - bombs, bikes, safes, knives, guns, he has dragged them all from the water, and more. I wonder what my magnet will dredge from the waters during 2025. Folk following my blog and socials can to keep up-to-date on the adventures to come. 

Holidays: 

Finally, because the major fire that crashed our lives in early 2024, which took away the lovely Sooshcat from our company, we had to cancel all of our holiday plans this past year. They are now firmly back on the cards now, with a May Day visit to the legendary Glastonbury, a Christmas stay in Japan, as well as a visit to Norwich to spend more precious time with my lovely first-born, whose company I still constantly crave. See you soon Ambikin XXXX And that's kind of that. Let's just see how the year unfurls. But please, pretty please, make it better than 2024!

🫨

What a cracking end to a godawful year:

Back to Work

Back to work after the Crimbo festivities. Short day made it bearable, though the rest of the work day was taken up with a hospital visit to see the opthalmic doctor.

It wasn't the best of experiences as I had a syringe pushed into my left eye tear ductt and saline squirted though it into my right nostril-ugh!! Upshot of that and various other checks and tests carried out is I need a tear duct readjusting ing in my left eyelid, which apparently requires 10 seconds of surgery. 

If that doesn't solve my issue, then I will need to have the corner of my eyelid tightened at an even later date.

For now though, it's another waiting game as the required surgery is being classed as just routine. Tick Tock. Tick tock.

2024 Review - Part 3

2024 is certainly ending a lot better than it began. I left the department that was giving me so much grief just weeks after giving myself a push and forcing myself to leave my comfort zone. I now have x2 jobs with my employer - one where I can put my writing skills into practice and have time to actual engage with my work rather than a robotic data entry clerk, which is work that literally drives me to despair!! I work that job x3 days a week, whilst spending the other x2 days, in the PCS union office. And so 2024 ends with me finally enjoying my paid work 🙂.

On a personal level, I have never been as happy as I have been these past few months. Both my physical health and mental well-being and making me excited to be alive, which, trust me, is not something I though I would be saying this time last year.

Financially we are doing well (thanks to  hard-earned job). The unburdening of struggling with day to day living expenses is something we have only achieved recently, and it really feels good to appreciate this security.

Finally, and importantly, I am at a place creatively where I can look back at my personal work with pride. 2025 already looks busy, and I hope to find time in the next x12 months to consolidate my creative portfolio and squeeze my way into some new ventures - more of which you'll discover in my upcoming New Year's blog entry...

My New 2025 Hobby

Christmas Mushroom 2024

Cheers to Cal for his latest hand-crafted Crimbo mushroon gift:

And here it is among my growing collection 🙂:

A Christmas Carol Pop Funko review

This is a fantastic set of figures. Scrooge is my favourite of the set by a country mile.

The ghost of Christmas present is perfect too, as is Jacob Marley, which has a fantastic texture to its glow in the dark surface. Tiny Tim was captured well with some amazing detail on the pop. 

The ghost of Chrismas yet to come had an amazing soft feel to its trailing rags. A nice feature, which would have made the figure more striking, but is sadly missing, would have been to have have included the faces if Ignorance and Want peeking through the rags.

The only real disappointing figure for me in the set was the ghost of Christmas past, which was too yellow, the candles were a too blocky and, without its box labling might not have been recognised as A Chrismas Carol Figure. This latter fault is perhaps also present in the Ghost of Christas yet to come. All in all though, it is a great set. Each figure comes with a great snowy London street stand that can interlock to present the collection nicely. And making three of the ghosts glow in the dark is also a cool feature. 

As for my photography, I think I will do better on a second attempt.

Boxing Day Garden

I put our Christmas day leftovers out in the garden in the afternoon to feed any hungry wildlife that happenned to pass by our patio. Whilst the second visitor was no suprise and cleaned up the bulk of the meal, the first visitor got a few roast potatoes down their throat before the food was cleared:
 

A foggy close to Boxing Day:

M R James - Collected Ghost Stories

Merry Crimbo 🎄

Planning next year's goals on my suprise present - an Amazon Scribe!

Pwscat ready for her crimbo dinner:

Pwscat on the prowl:

Looking Back on '24: Part 2

Looking back to the late Spring and the Summer of this year, the things I remember most is the unsettled feeling of moving from a trailer in Llanrhian Holiday Park to a small house in Manselton whilst we waited for our home to be fixed up after the housefire in March. I remember the caravan more fondly than the house as I felt that hiraeth of being back home in North Gower. Though, to be fair, the house in Manselton was too bad. This period was marred by a mental detachment I felt, which was probably a self-defence system to stop me getting stressed from the turmoil of our lives in that period of time. This knind of mental numbness made my working life difficult too and I began to hate my job with a passion as I felt 

what I was going through was not really appreciated in the department, where figures and accuracy meant everything. And so I decided to apply for positions in other departments, which I will talk more about in part 3 ps my 2024 round up.

Creatively, I guess I was on form and I finally managed to knock my first and longest novel, Cold Comfort into shape after it had sat in a cupboard drawer untouched for a quarter of a century. After I got that published, I wrote a fanzine on my favourite writer, Guy N Smith. This was a real work of love and seemed to down well with his friends and family, which really pleased me.

With much of our savings lost to the housefire, our holiday this year was reduced from our original plan of a weekend in Brussels, renting a airbnb in Glastonbury and a couple of weeks in Japan to a weekend camping in west Wales with my wife, son and his friends. Whilst enjoying the company and countryside, I also learned that I was getting a little too old to be sleeping on campings beds lol.

One other big event that will always stick in my mind from this time is our evening trip down to Rhossili Cliffs, where the sky turned into fantastic light show as the northern lights graced the British night like never before! 

Morning Delivering

Down my Mammy's this morning with pressies and M&S shopping:

Familiarr. Draft 2 complete

The 2nd draft of my final novel is now complete.

Familiar Update

Familiar. Part One. 2nd Draft. Completed.

Two Deer

 

A Purfick Crimbo Pressie

 If you haven't bought my last horror novel yet, now is the perfect time:

Click Image to purchase

See You Soon First Born

My baby girl went back to Norwich today. Its like having a piece of soul taken every time I say goodbye to her. But at the same time I am overjoyed she has made a great new life for herself and is very happy. It's not easy being a father.

Christmas Reading and the Christmas Cat

Thought I'd keep my recent Christmas reading ritual of reading one of these illustrated Ghost Stories - this year's tale being The Captain of the Polestar by Arthur Conan Doyle. (I am loving my new Christmas mug too.)

And whilst she hasn't got any competition this year, fudjcat still seems determined to look good for her role as this year's Christmas Cat.

A Family Night Out

Spent a lovely Saturday out with the family as my daughter was down from Norwich with her bf. Started off with a stroll around Mumbles, making the most of the mild evening.

Went for a high-class drink then at the Gin & Juice, where we tried their delicious Die Hard cocktail.

After that, we all headed down to Swansea Arena, where we watched the very funny Jimmy Carr.

I thought I'd close this post with some pics of the inside of Swansea's most controversial bridge, which connects the arena with the town centre, as it was my daughter's first time seeing it. I'm a big fan of the interior of the bridge but wish the exterior was painted more of a copper colour.

We got home around 1ish in the morning had ate our around the table at 1.30am lol. Loved the company and the evening.

GNS Receipt

One of Guy's old receipts. Kindly donated to me by Craig Kinsey. Thank you kindly, sir.

Tidying for Amber

Up at six to get the house sorted and put the decorations up ready for Amber coming home for the weekend.

Christmas at the Office

Christmas lunch and Yulefest day at the office.

 Mood dipping as I am desperate for a break from work.

Looking Back on 2024 - Part 1

And so this is Christmas 2024. And what a year it has been! I lost my beloved Soosh in a house fire back in March - an event I still do not think I have processed properly. I also lost most of the book collection I have built up since childhood plus a lot or nostalgic keepsakes, some which has been with me for over half a century. Uninsured, we had to cancel our planned Brusells, Glastonbury and Japan trips to get us at least back on our feet again. It has been a long process and even now the repercussions of the traumatic event have yet to be fully ironed out. Looking back on the first few months of 2024, the only good thing to manifest itself for me for that period of time was my hospital consultant finally put me on my new meds, which I need to be injected with every two weeks. This was a real game-changer for my health, and though it took 4 long years to prescribe me the injections, I am truly grateful to the NHS for allowing me access to this very expensive but miraculous medication. Today, at 58-and-a-half-years old, I have never been so healthy. And on that upbeat note, I think I will close this first part of my lookback on the year that was, and for a couple of weeks still is, 2024…