Time is a funny concept, never more so than at this time of year. How long has it been since Christmas? Is it time for the tree to be dethroned? Is mulled wine still acceptable? The kids are not yet back at school, yet the seasonal entertainment has, by and large, melted into the background. A few hours carved out here and there for writing activity is the most that can be hoped for and I found myself utilising the scant time that was available in other ways: redecorating the bathroom on a whim; organising the books in the dining room by colour - attractive, yet useless for finding texts. And time drifts by in these ways, getting caught up in paint choices and reading blurbs of previously forgotten tomes. Side note: my TBR pile has grown massively in the wake of rediscovering a whole swathe of books I never found time to read. And all the while being aware of the passage of time. What achievements did 2023 bring? What next for 2024?
As an effort for a new tradition on New Year’s Eve, we sat as a family whilst sharing a feast, chatting about what we were proudest of and enjoyed the most from the last year. We moved onto what we wanted out of 2024. For me, that’s deceptively simple: to move my writing career forwards. The coming months bring a host of plans - chief amongst them submitting extant work to agents, and completing my current writing. The kids had much more specific dreams - lots of museums were requested, as was a sewer tour (!) and a visit to a ‘theme park that looks like cardboard boxes’, ‘potato city’, and ‘lollipop land’. I’d welcome suggestions on achieving those latter suggestions! But perhaps more surprisingly, they also wanted to learn new skills in 2024: dancing, pizza-making, and skateboarding. I wonder whether sometimes as adults we forget the pure joy of learning for its own sake, rather than as a means to an end. It certainly made me re-examine my own goals, and add in a rather nebulous plan to do something else. Something creative, unconnected with my writing. Perhaps a return to quilting or sewing. Cooking was always a pleasure before dinner time became a battle of the starches for the still-forming palettes of the younger members of the family. And I am lousy at, but thoroughly enjoy, artistic endeavours of the pencil/paint and paper variety. Perhaps 2024 is the year in which I make time for those activities that are never going to become a side hustle, but instead bring pure escapism.
Time passes differently for all of us. Most of us will have, at one time or another, been sat in an objectively short meeting that appears to our own minds to have lasted several rotations around the sun. And those of us with kids will be very aware of just how quickly they grow up - from those first stumbling steps to an instant later running circles around us - both literally and metaphorically. I wonder how this plays out in our fantasy worlds. Long-lived elven communities seeing human dynasties fading in a heartbeat. A young woman living out her entire existence in the time a troll takes to awaken from stone. Or perhaps, like us, time is subjective across all species. That would certainly make the seemingly inevitable romance between the thousand year old fae warrior and the twenty year old human all the more believable.
And speaking of the passage of time, it has been a few weeks since my last newsletter. I hope that for those of you who observe various traditions at this time of year that you had the chance to celebrate in the way that best suits you, and if this time of year is difficult for you, that peace came when you most needed it. I wish you all a joyous and hopeful 2024.