Happy New Year!

Back at work after Christmas, very depressing. At least work is quiet after the hideously busy few months preceding (hence no blogging).

Another year rolls round, with the inevitable list of resolutions, which for me reappear each year with depressing regularity (must get flat stomach; get book published; become all round super-woman with perfect work/life balance etc etc.)

Looking back over 2007, I fear I have achieved precisely zero of the above, and after the bingeing on chocolate, cheese, food in general, sherry (don't ask!) port, wine and champagne, with a few Baileys thrown in for good measure (just to prove I will drink "grain" as well as "grape") I look more like a six month pregnant elephant, so the flat stomach element of the resolutions is probably further away than ever.

Nevertheless, it's onwards and upwards (or possibly just sideways) with the blog/book enterprise. I've joined a new Harper Collins group called "authonomy" which is an online forum for aspiring writers to post some of their book and get readers to comment - a democratic slush pile, apparently, but also perhaps, a time saving device to stop the juniors at HC having to wade through thousands of hopeless manuscripts in the hope of finding a booker winner, which invariably never happens. Almost like getting us to do the hard work for them (not that I'm being cynical of course, because it's all about consumer power and word of mouth in the age of web 2.0)

This has also led me to discovering another website with a similar aim: YouWriteOn . Again, writers post their books, and readers read and comment. It's not affiliated to any publisher, but some agents and publishers do look on it, according to the information on the home page. So I will no doubt join that one too, and hope that another tiny voice of mine calling in the online wilderness will add to the others and be finally heard.