2013… an interesting year… part 2

I started to write about the brilliant things which have happened in 2013… but the list got rather long, so here is part 2:-

2013 seems to have been very busy, lots and lots of music, wonderful times with friends, lots of sunshine, family, lots of writing, visits to new places, meeting new people, pubs and beer, undertaking new enterprises…

Writing:-

• publishing ‘night vision’ and ‘Flipside’ on Kindle
• publishing my children’s books in soft-back (problems with distribution, so maybe 20114 will be the year for them!)
• completing the 50,000 word challenge of the National Novel Writing Month
• Starting and nearly finishing my new book ‘Radwinter’, which I hope to publish in the early months of 2014
• continuing with my WordPress blog every day

New Places:-

• Glasgow
• Sandsend, Yorkshire
• Utrecht
• Plymouth
• The British Museum
• Winchelsea
• Dungeness

Pubs:-

• lots of new pubs visited
• lots of new and different beer tasted
• a visit to the Otter Brewery in Devon
• the continued excellence of our local, the Dolphin
• Not beer but whisky… I became reacquainted with Highland Park, my favourite whisky and now with very special memories attached to it!

New enterprises:-

• My new novel, Radwinter, – the first new writing I’ve done for several years, (I’ve been busy editing older work and getting it published, so the muse hasn’t dried!)
• my MOOC (massive open on-line course) ‘Archaeology’s Dirty Little Secrets’ from Brown University… I wonder what course I’ll don in 2014?!
• U3A – the University of the Third Age; I belong to the French conversation group, and I am leading a Creative Writing group
• 5:2 diet… a success until it was ambushed by Christmas!

New People:-

• Not exactly new, but Eddie Perez who I sat with  in a pub in Glasgow, talking about love, life, writing, friends, music… a never to be forgotten experience… 
• …and on that same night sitting with Raul Malo and talking about music, his voice, Oxford, Bristol… except I was so in awe I can barely remember it, except in my dreams!
• two of my cousins have new partners, lovely people!
• my son’s girlfriend
• new friends, les nouvelles amies, in my French conversation class
• my new group of creative writers
• my new NaNoWriMo buddies

As I mentioned in the part 1 of this post, I’m sure there are other things I have done over the year, things I’ve enjoyed which for some reason seem to have drifted out of my mind!