Saturday 31 December 2011

New Year's Resolutions

1. Send back the silver salt-cellar and pepper-pot to King's College. I am not going to give indiscreet details about how they came into my possession; suffice it to say that they shouldn't have. And I have held on to them for long enough (i.e. more years than I care to remember).

They will be going in an anonymous, unlabelled parcel, of course. My instinct for righting wrongs is not infinite.

2. Get my M.A. As this consists entirely of writing a letter asking aforesaid King's College to graduate me in absentia, it's rather embarrassing that I haven't done it yet. But sometime in 2012 I will be B. R. Collins, M.A. (Cantab). Promise.

3. Do something at least once a week that I haven't done before.

4. Fall in love with someone single, available, fairly well-adjusted, fairly solvent and living within ten miles of Tunbridge Wells. (Which is where I live, rather than just some arbitrarily picked area.) How hard can it be?

Oh, and resist the temptation to blog about my love-life...

5. Edit Edward Leigh. Finish The School of Glass. Think up an idea for my next book for Bloomsbury and write that too.*

6. Keep writing. Stop giving myself a hard time about getting a proper job. If I decide I really need a proper job, just get one.

7. Have more sex. As before: how hard can it be?**

(Note to self: lower standards if necessary. Possibly also applicable to Resolution 4.***)

8. Answer all queries about laundry, washing up, tidying up, emptying the dishwasher, cooking etc. with, 'Sorry, I made a New Year's Resolution not to do that any more.'

9. Live adventurously.

10. Stop getting really, really angry about politics. Do whatever I can, and then swallow unnecessary fury and try to achieve serenity. (Ha!)

Also, hold people in the light more. Try to see the good in everyone, even wankers, arses, idiots and total shits... (Yes, well. Possibly this one might need some work.)

11. Stop overusing brackets, italics, smiley faces, asterisks and... ellipses.

12. Stop buying lottery tickets. Except metaphorical ones. Buy more metaphorical lottery tickets.


* If I put these all in one terse, unchatty resolution I'm hoping they'll seem like less work.

** Oo-er.

*** This is a joke. Probably. :)

2 comments:

  1. Another, rather belated footnote: just started to wonder whether all the qualifiers in Resolution 4 make it incompatible with Resolution 9. Hmmm.

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  2. Dear Br Collins,

    Sorry to leave this (hopefully only slightly) gushy fan letter on your blog, as I could not find an email address to send you a fan letter, of sorts.

    I have just recently read the Traitor Game after a friend recommended it to me, as she is completely obsessed with the book. I utterly loved it and both myself and my friend as desperately hoping for a sequel as we both fell in love with Evgard and what possible stories could come from it's universe.

    I wanted to ask if there is an address I can write to in order to obtain an autograph? As I said my friend is utterly obsessed and in love with your book and if by some form I can obtain your autograph for her, I think she might marry me on the spot.

    Thanks so much for reading this, and if you wish to contact me privately my email address is benthebook@gmail.com

    Yours sincerely,

    Ben

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