Can I just say one thing? I’m going to preface it by saying that I like creative people. Some of my best friends in the whole world are artists and writers and such. They’re good, cool, fun people. There should be more of them. What sh*ts me, though, is the twee creative person who wants everyone to be creative, and really only values you as a ‘real’ person if you’re an artist of some sort; the person who thinks you’re only whole and complete if you’re writing or drawing or painting. One of my friends actually referred to what I do as secondary creativity, or creativity gone astray. What I do every day was somehow less worthwhile, less valuable to the world than sitting in a room by myself producing my own ‘art’. Can you spell f*ck off, girls and boys? The only true art you have is your life and how you live it. So here’s a New Year’s wish. In 2006, may you spend time with the ones you love and do something that fulfills you. This has been a venting by the management of Coode Street.

If you don’t have any New Year’s Resolutions of your own, then borrow someone else’s. Here Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman hook up to present New Year’s resolutions for Crowley and Aziraphale from Good Omens. Maybe it’s a sign we may see a new Good Omens story some day, which would be cool.

Oh yeah. As I know kdl would appreciate, all of this blogging is avoidance. I am overdue for a year-in-review column for Locus. I need to talk to CHARLES about it, just to get his angle on a few things, but I’m delaying. Still, I didn’t get it in till January 11 last year, so another two days won’t kill anyone. I’m also avoiding a LOT of other deadlines, still…

I’ve been meaning to replace the photo at the top right of the blog for a while. It was originally taken by Beth Gwinn in Oakland back in 2002. It doesn’t really reflect how I look now, which is older, greyer, larger, and less likely to wear contact lenses all the time.

With that in mind, I’ve borrowed the photo here from Ellen Datlow’s flickr journal. She took it at Madison back in November so (sadly) it pretty accurately reflects what I look like.

As I rebuild the blog over the next few weeks I’ll be replacing the old photo with a new one and making other changes.

What else? I’ll be 42 tomorrow, and yet somehow I don’t feel like the answer to life, the universe and everything. Still, it should be ok. One question I’ve been meaning to put to all of you Coode Streeters out there is this: in April I’m traveling to Brisbane for Conjure where I will be a guest of honor. I’ll be doing at least four panels, and some other stuff. My question is, is there anything you’d like to hear me talk about it? I actually think I might dive back into the Australian SF question, but I’d like to do something more interesting than the ‘year in review’ panel, which always seems dull to me.

I have to remember not to judge a year by the way you feel on the last few days before New Year. It feels like a long, tiring year that left me wrung out, and kinda depressed. Certainly, career-wise, the last three months have been a bust. Still, these things were good in 2005:

• No-one I know closely had any major personal tragedies. Standard sized disasters and other problems, yes. But no-one’s dead, and no-one’s more seriously ill or injured than they were at the beginning of the year. This is a happy change from previous years.
• Robin and Toula got married. This is a very good thing. Robin is one of my oldest and dearest friends, and Toula is great.
• I had three new books published during the year, finished two more, sold a couple, and am well progressed on a couple more.
• I had dozens of Saturday mornings, Sunday afternoons, and occasional moments when domesticity and family life was golden, and my three girls were the best people to be with in the world.
• I went to Sydney, Oakland and Madison in October/November and saw Terry, CHARLES, Liza, Amelia, Kirsten, AAron, Teddy, Karlyn, Tim, Carolyn, Gary, Garth, Justin, Sharyn, and lots and lots of other people.

There are other things, but that’s enough to be getting on with. I don’t know that I’ll bother with NYresolutions, which tend not to work, but I’ve got some stuff to work out. I need to re-think my work approach (which has hit a dry spot), work out how to enjoy what I’m doing more, and so on. I even think I might re-title and rejuvenate this blog a bit. It’s been some years since I lived at Coode Street, so it seems a bit silly to keep the name.