For various reasons I’m a bit late to the What I Will Accomplish This Year 2024 party.

I have goals – quite lofty ones really, but who knows what I will have the time and energy to achieve? But if I decided, you know what, I’ll take a year out, the danger is I won’t achieve anything, and what’s the point of that?

So here we go – this is 2024 as I see it, part of the way through the second week of January. this is what i would want to do, in an ideal world, if the sky was the limit and i didn’t have cancer treatment to deal with.

1. Finish and publish Dottie Manderson mysteries book 8: Midnight, the Stars And You. This has to be this year’s main priority in terms of writing, because people keep saying things like, you know, when is it out? There’s only so many times you can nod and smile and say, it’s coming, honest. There’s a teaser for it on here somewhere. If you fancy taunting yourself with something that is still four or five months away, here it is. I promise it’ll arrive eventually.
2. Because I felt pretty down about the whole ‘by the way, you’ve got breast cancer’ thing, apart from working on the 2nd book of the Miss Gascoigne 1960s mystery series (which came out on Dec 8th) I started playing around with a book I wrote over ten years ago, purely for fun, and it’s actually almost ‘there’ – almost ready for publication, and so although it’s not part of any of my three series, I will very likely publish that in February, just for fun. It’ll just be a one-off, stand alone novel like Easy Living. This book is called The Cousins, and again, there’s a teaser and a bit of info here.
3. Now I know last year, in a fit of optimism I started banging on about a new story in the Friendship Can Be Murder series, which has been out for over ten years and I kind of thought was finished at three books. And I have written quite a lot for that new book, but it’s nowhere near ready, and so, let’s be honest, it’s not likely to make an appearance in 2024, or if it does it’ll sneak out at the very last minute. I tentatively called that book Dirty Work, and I do hope to finish it and publish it over the next year or two, but there’s no date as yet.
4. And then, my second main priority will be to get to work and finish and publish book 3 of the Miss Gascoigne mysteries. This will be Through Dancing Poppies, and I hope/plan/rashly promise it will be out in November of December of this year. You can bang on my door and demand it if I don’t deliver.
5. My next German translation of a Dottie book is due out at the end of this month. If you love to read a novel in German, this could be perfekt for you! Keep your eyes peeled for Rosenblüten und weiße Spitze: ein Dottie Manderson Fall: Buch 7. Zitat aus Rosenblüten und weiße Spitze: Ein Dottie Manderson Fall: Buch 7

And by the way, if I seem flippant about the cancer, I’m not. But I am open to talking about it – as they say, fear of the name increases fear of the thing itself, and I refuse to live in fear. I trust the medical team at the hospital where I’m having treatment, in fact they’ve been blooming amazing, and I believe them when they say that ‘eventually’ I will be okay. And so many lovely people are praying for me… And if only we could get proper funding for the NHS I’d be a happy bunny. I believe passionately in a national health service – good health is not something that should be the preserve of the wealthy.

So that’s how my 2024 is looking right now. What are you doing with yours? Got any plans for world domination or maybe a nice holiday?

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