Happy New Year to All in Blogland!!!!

No, I still don't believe it - I know I keep saying this, but it can't be the end of 2009, let alone the end of the "noughties", can it? It doesn't seem five minutes ago that we were doing the New Millennium stuff - remember having to stock the cupboards with enough food to last a lifetime and waiting for your computer to crash forever because civilization as we knew it was going to come to an end at midnight on New Year's Eve 1999? How can that be 10 years ago???

But it was, and here we are, somehow just about to go into Twenty-Ten. I hope it's happy and peaceful and brings you everything you need/want/hope for. I'm not big on resolutions (never manage to keep them, then always feel guilty and even more of a failure), but I do always feel sort of energised at this time of the year. I've got my new (Jersey) calendar ready to put on the wall in front of the desk and my new diary (really pretty - pink with hippie flowers) poised by the keyboard, and a list of writing projects in my pristine Pukka Pad to tackle once Midnight Feast - er, The Way To A Woman's Heart - is finished, waiting beside the computer. Today I'm itching to get on with writing again, and can only hope the itch lasts longer than my erstwhile resolutions...

2009, against all the odds, has been a lovely year for me. After a dire and dreadful 2008 I held out no hopes at all, but what with Elle and The Doctor's wonderful wedding (and subsequent blissfully happy marriage), and The Toyboy Trucker's exam successes and promotion (I still miss the jeans and T-shirt and boots and heady whiff of diesel though...) and the fun of making the Writers Bureau telly advert, and getting a new two-book deal with Piatkus, and my books selling so well in Germany and therefore giving me a regular income, and none of the cats dying - what more could I ask for? We're happy and healthy. We've got a cosy, comfortable home, enough food to eat, loads of great friends, no real worries, and an okay future. I know I'm lucky. Very. If 2010 is half as good I'll be delighted.

So, no resolutions - but a real intention to write, write, write in 2010 - and keep writing. Because I'm lucky there, too. I'm published. It was my hopeless dream for so long that I'll never, ever take it for granted.

Enough of the sentimental waffling then - just want to say a huge thank you to all my blogland friends for being brilliant - and again, whatever you want in 2010 I hope you achieve it with bells and whistles and fireworks and fanfares of celestial trumpets. I'll raise a glass of fizz to you all at midnight as me and The Toyboy Trucker scamper around the terrace with Shaz and Dave, Nikki and Memphis, Vee and the kids, Wilf, Maudie and Jerome, and Nancy - and wish you everything that you wish yourselves.

Oh, yes - and there's just one more little selfish wish - MOONSHINE is published three weeks today and I really, really hope that people buy it and read it, and more importantly, like it - because I do...

Happy New Year - and THANK YOU!!!!