Happy new year, folks! I hope you had a peaceful and enjoyable festive season with family and friends. With 2016 firmly behind us, it’s time to look forward to this new year and, as is traditional, consider our aims and goals for the twelve months ahead. This time last year I put up a post listing all my new year’s resolutions – I’m not going to do that this year, mainly because I struggle to keep them! Instead all I’m going to say is that this year I will continue to work diligently on my books and I am aiming to publish my new novel, Ethersay, and one novella. I’m also going to diversify – there are many literary forms with which I haven’t dabbled for a lot of years, and I’d like to rediscover some of these. Short stories and poetry are foremost in my mind but, who knows, there may be other things! The name of the game this year will be going with the flow, and seeing where it leads.

With that in mind, I was quite excited to find a tempting short story competition on Mslexia. Mslexia, for those who haven’t come across it, is an online and magazine platform for female writers. So, I’ve penned an entry, tentatively called The Ticket. The story focuses on an encounter between a Czech-born shop worker and a distressed young woman one winter’s night in a corner shop in Blackpool. In the woman’s hand is a winning lottery ticket, but everything is not as it seems…

So, wish me luck! You never know, my story may feature in a future edition of Mslexia magazine and if it doesn’t, I’ll be sure to post it up here!