Happy New Year (and other stuff)

First of all, Happy New Year to all my blogging friends. As I get older, I'm finding the Christmas season is as much about learning for me as anything else. The kicker is that usually they're things I should have known all along. Here are three things I learned this Christmas (a.k.a. Conduit states the bleedin' obvious...)

• A small gesture for you can mean the world to someone else.
• A kind word can mean the difference between quitting and going on.
• A little romance goes a long way.

What I'm Reading

I have once again put down a huge bestseller half-finished because, frankly, it's rubbish. I find this happening more and more often. Josephine Damian has been blogging about this very thing. I'm not a fast reader, and have little spare time to devote to it, so that time is precious. I'm gettting sick of realising too late that I've wasted a significant amount of that time on a lazy author going through the motions, providing me with two dimensional characters, plotting for plot's sake, twists for twist's sake, and trite cliches.

It was a very pleasant surprise to then pick up a book by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr called Bust, as recommended to me by Chris Holm, and find it to be the most fun, entertaining, surprising, joyously trashy, wickedly nasty novel I have read in a very long time. I believe it's part of a series so I'll be hitting Amazon for the rest.

Every Day Fiction

For anyone that's interested, my flash fiction piece Opening Time will appear in the January 3rd edition of Every Day Fiction. I'll post a link when it's out there.