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| A front page mention for my Boxing Day piece in the EDP |
It's that time of year again - time to look back over what I have achieved over the past twelve months, and to wonder what the next year might have in store.
I fear I must report that, as with last year, not only am I no closer to achieving my dream of having a novel professionally published, I basically made no effort at all to achieve anything in that direction throughout 2022. I barely wrote any fiction at all - just a few fragments here and there for projects which will almost certainly never see the light of day.
However, I do have some excuse. Back in January, I set myself some targets for the year. Having decided after the success of The Long Game that, for the time being at least, it was far more worthwhile to put my efforts into non-fiction than fiction, I decided to have a go at writing another factual book. This I now have a draft of, it seems to have gone reasonably well, and fingers crossed it looks as if it may appear sometime in 2023 - more on that as and when.
So one target was to write a draft of a new non-fiction book, and I have achieved that. The other was related to my day job - I wanted to make two more radio documentaries. I had in mind from very early on what I wanted them to be, too. One about Banksy's "Spraycation" in the summer of 2021, to go out around the first anniversary of it happening and using bits of our live programming from the time to tell the story of what happened. The other was a local documentary for the BBC's centenary celebrations, and I managed to achieve both of these. In fact, I ended up not only making these two, but four documentaries altogether this year - also doing one the week the Queen died with some local remembrances and archive, and one for this Christmas looking back at local Formula One driver George Russell's first year with the Mercedes team. We even got to speak to George for this, which as a big armchair Formula One fan I enjoyed putting together.
I think, then, that I can look back on the year with some satisfaction. I was also able to carry on writing some other bits and bobs. I was flattered to be asked to make some more contributions to Doctor Who Magazine, and the Eastern Daily Press printed some more features of mine tied-in with some of our radio programmes. I even managed to squeeze another one of the latter in before the end of the year, with a Boxing Day piece about our Treasure Quest special.
This time last year I wrote that there was some exciting news coming up radio-wise, which was that in January my 2021 Nexus documentary got a national airing on 4 Extra, which was immensely pleasing - especially it getting good write-ups in The Times and the Radio Times.
So all of that was good, and once again I look back on a year when I have been very fortunate and can be satisfied that I was able to use whatever writing skills I have in a professional capacity. And yet...
I still have to face up to the fact that I am basically middle-aged now, and still after all these years of ambition I have never been able to earn any money at all from writing any fiction. You'd think I'd be able to get a little something in somewhere, but no.
I just have to try harder, I suppose. I'm not sure what avenue I could pursue to try and achieve that during 2023, but getting back to fiction more generally will have to be on the list. After all, you can't become a novelist if you're not at least trying to write novels...
Happy New Year, everybody!
