Last year I made five New Year's resolutions, and managed to succeed with four of them, so this year I'm going to see if I can go one better and make it five out of five successful New Year's resolutions. Here are my resolutions for 2015...

A low key scene. Much like the plot in my forthcoming short story.

1) Publish a short story

This was the one resolution which let me down last year. However, I recently finished the first draft of one short story, and whereas my first full length book deals with an evil genocidal plot, things are more low key in this short story. It's a simple everyday 'slice of life' story, and it features minor characters from my previous books. Hopefully I'll get it published later in the year.

2) Publish my next novel/novella

One thing I'm not too accurate at is estimating the length of a story. When I started writing my first scifi story, I imagined it would be a single book, but it ended up spanning six books and over 2,000 pages! With my next novel things have gone the other way, because I'm over halfway through the first draft and I suspect it's going to be more of a novella, rather than a full length novel. There's still quite a bit of dialogue, but this time each chapter pretty much gets straight on with the story.

My next novel/novella doesn't feature characters from my previous books, but it does feature a couple of characters from popular culture who pretty much everyone will recognise, and I aim to have it finished and published before the end of 2015.

'True Or False' was the subject of one of last year's resolutions.

3) Discover more authors

Until a few years ago I only really used to read comedy or light-hearted books, and it's only relatively recently that I've discovered an appreciation for other genres.

I've already got a large backlog of outstanding books to get through, but this year I plan to try more new authors, so hopefully I'll be able to feature some new authors in the book reviews which I occasionally feature on this blog.

4) Keep blogging

This was one of my New Year's resolutions last year and I still love blogging so I'm making the same resolution again. I suppose it's a bit of a cheat to resolve to do something which you love doing, because you're obviously going to keep doing it anyway if you love doing it. However, it always makes sense to put your goals down in writing, so that's what I'm doing.

5) #NotReally

And my final New Year's resolution is to stop using spray-on deodorant.

Roll on 2015!




Finally, here's how I got on with last year's New Year's resolutions:

1) Publish at least one short story - FAIL!

A bad start, as my first New Year's resolution of 2014 was the only one I failed to keep. However, as explained above, I've got a first draft completed of one short story and hopefully I'll get a final draft totally finished and published within the next few months.

2) Start working on a full length novel - WIN!

As explained above, it looks like it's going to turn out to be a novella, rather than a full length novel, but I did manage to make a start on it and I would estimate that I'm more than halfway through writing the first draft.

The drilimba fruit would be nice if it was real, but sadly it doesn't actually exist. Read about it's alleged diet benefits in my spoof story about 'calorie negative ready meals'.

3) Keep blogging - WIN!

As well as the Charles Fudgemuffin blog, I also run a few other blogs, such as Tomorrow's Technology Today and Outside The Box Employment Agency.

They're both spoof blogs, featuring fake technology and fake jobs, and you can find some sample blog posts at the links below:

Tech: 'Calorie negative' ready meals set to revolutionise modern diets
Jobs: Graffiti Artist Humiliation Officer

4) Fiction or non-fiction? - WIN!

I mentioned in last year's resolutions that I was working on a book which was part fiction and part non-fiction. The book I was referring to was 'True Or False: A Light-Hearted Collection Of 100 Facts And Bluffs' which is now available for kindle from Amazon.




If you're making some New year's resolutions of your own this year then you're not alone. You can find the top ten most popular New Year's resolutions, and also some less common resolutions, in the links below:
Top ten new year's resolutions
Ten less common new year's resolutions