Twenty-fifteen

2015.

A new year.

I’m hoping for a good one. Fifteen has been my lucky number since I was a kid, when it was the number of my winning raffle ticket at a school gala. I took home a big basket of junk food, the kinds of things my mother wouldn’t usually buy, and although I don’t remember what was in it, I remember the shock and absolute thrill of having won.

I haven’t made any new year’s resolutions, other than to resolve that I will finish and release Against the Clock sometime before my birthday in mid-April, and that I will get another book finished and released before Christmas. (It may be High Jump, the third in the Clearwater Bay series. It may not.)

I saw in the new year at Pony Club Camp, sitting at a trestle table underneath the main grandstand at the Otaki-Maori Racing Club, playing hand after hand of P&A as we waited for the clocks to tick over to midnight. I won a few rounds and I lost a few too. Mostly I finished in the middle, content to be mediocre. The children hung around, summoned by the bell at ten minutes to twelve, and we counted the new year down together. Poured sparkling wine and fizzy drinks into plastic mugs, and clacked them together. Thought about what 2014 had brought us, and what our hopes would be for 2015. And then we all drifted off to bed, knowing that we had several hours of riding ahead of us the next day.

There was a scene (well, a handful of scenes) in the original draft of Dream On that I removed before I published it, because they slowed the story down too much. But I have put them online for any interested parties to read, so if you want to know how Kris, Van and Marley celebrate New Year’s Eve, you can read those deleted scenes here.

I hope 2015 has found you well and will do right by you as the year progresses. Ngā mihi o te Tau Hou – Happy New Year!