A Disappointing Year

Oh, 2024, what a strange and stressful year you were. Looking back at my blog of January last year, I’m laughing at my goals because other than doing more live events, I failed to achieve any of them. I think if I were to sum up 2024 in one word it would be disappointing.

It began in January with a nasty kidney infection and my tumble dryer going bang. Great start there, 2024, but I should have known you were only easing me in gently. My then lodger was also giving me a lot of grief. A grown woman in her forties who really should have known better, she was acting in a downright childish manner and just causing me stress. I did not shed any tears when she left. I cleaned the room thoroughly because she’d left it in a bit of a mess and had to buy a new mattress. She’d left the existing mattress covered in large and very unsightly brown stains. As I was within my legal right to, I used the damages deposit to replace the mattress as the one she’d damaged was unfit for purpose. That caused a lot of upset and nastiness, including her sending her large and burly male friend around to hammer on my door, scream in my face, and demand her money back. Not nice. Very intimidating.

In February, she moved out. I put the room up for rental and within a day had found a lovely new lodger. I am happy to report that ten months later he is still living here, and I still think he’s lovely, so at least that’s one good thing. I also took a nasty tumble onto concrete this month and ended up with a badly bruised and smashed-up face. It scared me mightily and made me reluctantly decide that flat shoes and boots were the only way to go from now on. I haven’t fallen over since so that was the right call.

March. I finished writing book sixteen this month. Hide & Seek is book six in the Blackwood Family Saga and I planned for it to be the first of three books I wrote in 2024. Launch day happened towards the end of the month and I was pleased with how well the book sold. Easter happened. I drove up north to collect Franki and Rys to come home for the Easter holidays. It was great having them here, but I went down with a nasty cough that seemed to clear up after a few days but then kept coming back. When I finally spoke to a doctor about it in July, he confirmed that it was whooping cough and that there was “a lot of it going around.”

April passed in a blur of having the girls home, working overtime, and doing three live events. I was also still suffering from the cough and trying to begin writing my next book. If I wanted to publish three in 2024, I needed to get a move on.

In May I made the crazy decision to completely revamp my whole garden. So, writing was put on hold. I didn’t appreciate how long it was going to take though, or how much I would spend on paint, varnish, new garden furniture, and plants. May and June were both wet and cold months, I even had to put the heating on in June because it was that cold. Every spare moment I had that it was not raining, I was bundled up and outside painting. It took weeks and weeks.

In June, my mother had a stroke. Luckily, it was reasonably mild and didn’t affect her speech too much, but it was still scary, and it was a time of readjustment for the whole family. I painted and painted and painted in the garden. I just about finished it in time for the summer. No writing was done at all. At the end of June, Franki and Rys arrived home for the summer. I had so much planned for the three months they were going to be home. Trips to the coast and the surrounding countryside. Long, lazy days in the garden. Games nights and movie sessions. Did any of these things happen? No. What with me working double shifts the whole of July and then Franki getting a job that involved her working long hours, there never seemed time to do anything.

In July I turned 57 and, as if to celebrate, the summer weather finally arrived, literally on my birthday. This was a huge relief as I had a table booked in the garden of a local restaurant for myself and six of my friends the next day. It was a lovely occasion though. Good weather, good food, good wine, and good company — what more do you need on your birthday?

August rolled around and Franki turned 21. Not wanting a big party or much of a fuss, they opted for a large charcuterie table and a night of Taylor Swift and cocktails. It was another busy month of work and live events. The weather stayed lovely, but I never had time to sit in my garden and I certainly had no time to write.

September. A lot more live events including the big one, Norwich Comic Con, at which I did very well. Rys went away with her family for a holiday, so Franki and I had a few days together, which was nice. We even managed a quick trip to the coast, but the weather was awful, so we didn’t stay long. Then it was time to move them both into their new university in Reading. A long, very very long day of loading up the van and the car from the storage locker, braving the horrible roads around London, and finding the university and their accommodation. Moving them in. Assessing the flat, which was very nice, then having to face IKEA on a Saturday afternoon on the admittance day of one of the largest universities in the country and then having to do the big grocery shop in the hypermarket. I then had the worst car journey of my life on roads I didn’t know in the dark and the rain, utterly exhausted and coughing up a lung (the whooping cough had re-emerged).

October was wet, cold, and generally miserable. I still hadn’t had time to start writing again as every spare minute was being spent trying to create gorgeous hardback copies of some of my books. It was all taking a lot longer than I thought it would, but I was confident they would be out in time for the Christmas markets. The lady I job-share with was away for the whole of the month on a 28-day cruise (I know, very nice for some) so I picked up a lot of overtime. This was just as well, as my boss was off work for a ten-day holiday, so the extra pay compensated for my days lost then.

November was a month of continuing to struggle to get my hardback books produced and the absolute nightmarish pain in the arse that was turning out to be. I also had yet another long drive to Reading and then up to Chester, where we stayed for a couple of nights to attend Franki and Rys’s graduation ceremony. It was lovely, but the expense of the Airbnb, plus all the driving just to go to a 45-minute service I could have watched on YouTube made me question if it was worth it. Driving back from Chester, I barely had an hour at home before an old friend arrived to stay for a few days. Towards the end of the month, I had the first Christmas market of the season, and I went down with another horrendous cough and cold.

December is always a busy month, and this one was no exception. I had three weekends of nonstop live events, and I was still struggling with trying to publish my hardback books. I hadn’t written a word since April — so much for my plan to publish three books in 2024 — and when disaster struck and my Amazon KDP account was found to have a fault meaning I couldn’t use it, I was just about ready to give up being an author full stop. Needless to say, my books were not ready for Christmas, well, not really. I did manage to acquire a few author copies which sold very well at the fairs I did, but I couldn’t publish them through Amazon, so no one worldwide was able to buy them.

Christmas itself was quiet to the point of boring and I spent much of it alone. Franki and Rys were not coming home until New Year’s Day and once again I was facing a long drive to collect them. I ended the year by going to bed at 9pm on New Year’s Eve because I was exhausted and facing an early start and a long drive the next day.

Can you understand now why I say it has been a very disappointing year for me? I did achieve a few things such as the garden, getting the hardback books sorted, and doing quite well at live events, but mostly it was twelve months of failure to achieve. I didn’t write the books I planned to; I didn’t save the money I intended to; and I didn’t have the trips out that I wanted. I did lose weight, but climbing onto the scales this morning for the first time since Christmas, I discovered to my horror that I now weigh Exactly the same as I weighed on this day in January 2024. So, a long year of brutal dieting has achieved precisely nothing.

Will 2025 be any better? Well, I’m not doing the number of live events this year. We have figured out which ones work and which ones don’t, and I will be focusing on the successful ones. I’m not tackling any large house projects so that should give me more time. Franki and Rys are not coming to stay until possibly the end of their academic year in September, and even then, it probably won’t be for long. Hopefully, I will have more time to write and focus on my author career. Am I aiming for three books? Well, no, let’s aim for two and see how much of the year is left after that. I’m back on the eating plan, very annoyed with myself, but I’ve done it once so I know I can do it again. With the girls not coming to stay it means the house won’t be full of tempting food and the smell of nice things cooking. It’s certainly easier to diet when you live alone.

Mostly, I’m focusing on me. On living within my means, staying healthy, trying to have fun where I can, relax and take things a bit easier this year. I’d like a drama-free year, but I don’t suppose for one moment I will get one.

I hope that 2025 is a better one for all of us. Take care and I look forward to chatting with you next time.

Julia Blake