Hello, beautiful human, and welcome to 2014.

My 2013 was intense. I ran some more races, including my first 10K. I celebrated my birthday in Barcelona and FunkyPlaid’s birthday in Normandy. I sold a short story for actual cash money and placed another one (publications forthcoming this year). I made new friends and hosted wonderful visitors and moved house and got a job. I participated in the Edinburgh International Book Festival and helped to coordinate Edinburgh’s National Flash Fiction Day event. I floundered and flapped my way around database design, picking up some new skills on the way. I visited Orkney, and the furthest point north I have been on the globe thus far.

And Iain Banks died. The last and only conversation I had with him involved me stammering out something about train travel. Of all things? Train travel. He was gracious and articulate. And for the rest of my life I’m going to remember that, that we talked about trains in the Traverse Bar Café, and I couldn’t believe it was happening and I can’t believe it won’t ever happen again.

Toward the end of 2013 I stopped using my Fitbit activity tracker because I had stopped caring about “the quantified self”. I’m done trying to understand how to tweak my myriad failings in hopes my improved self will eventually be a person the world needs. My current focus is figuring out how to use my extant strengths to help make the world better right damned now. I would tell you that this shift resulted from some sort of therapy or epiphanic yoga retreat or magnesium supplements but it happened because I finally realised that it really doesn’t matter if I get 10,000 steps a day if I’m a self-involved troglodyte who doesn’t contribute anything positive to society.

Resolutions aren’t my bag. But I’m still alive, and I’ve got things to do, so I am going to do these things. What do you think? Shall we do some of these things together? Because I’d really like that.

Thanks for bearing with the Holidailies fits and starts this year. I lost focus as soon as FunkyPlaid’s arrival was imminent, but I was always reading. My inspiration this time around was Sharks, whose charming and thought-provoking writing I will miss desperately.

Writing from: the tree-lit lounge. Listening to: rain against the windowpanes and Zen’s zip-line snores.