2014, in some pictures:

January – the train ride between Edinburgh and Glasgow

February – in Amsterdam for D’s birthday

March – I read Kirsty Logan’s The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales, one of my 2014 books of the year

Standing stones on Machrie Moor, erected c. 3,500-1,500 B.C.E
April on Arran – ancient standing stones and a strangely dry looking landscape (don’t let it fool you)

photo credit: D
May – D, A and I went to Moscow


June – two images since I couldn’t chose just one. A fantastic birthday trip to Iona and the finished first draft of Monstirs, which would go on to be accepted by Queen’s Ferry Press and renamed On the Edges of Vision – due out in August of the new year!

July – a trip to Butterfly World/ metaphor of the busy bee

August – York from on high (up on York Minster)

September – what else but the Scottish Independence Referendum. The country wasn’t ready yet (and the media was determined it would stay unready). The world turns, and I feel like it will happen in my lifetime.

October – a ghostly park in Glasgow

November – in the Winter Gardens at Glasgow’s People’s Palace

December – lingering seed heads on a vine, in front of a Christmas tree in a window.
This year:
I’ve read 35 books (which is good for me)
Travelled abroad to The Netherlands and Italy
Visited islands and breathed good sea air, damp fog, cut grass –
Wrote – a collection of flash fiction and longer pieces, pieces from which you can find links to HERE and at some point in August or July if you pre-order and if you have the notion you will be able to BUY the COLLECTION because it will be a real object in the real world all holding its many fragments close to itself oh my heart. (And though I linked to it before, here is my essay on the writing of On the Edges of Vision)
Wrote – a novella in flash fiction which was an honourable mention for the CCM Mainline contest/readathon/act of readerly epicness
Wrote – a chapbook of flash which is floating out there being read
– and began writing a linked flash fiction collection/narrative thing which I have neglected recently in the festivities
Read so many stories for Necessary Fiction as the new Fiction Editor there. Here are all the stories I’ve selected so far –
I am trying to keep things at gender parity, without imposing quotas or any such thing. It can be done – it truly believe the ‘but quotas harm art!!’ is a strawman argument. In that light, I will keep calling for submissions for people outside the straight-white-male venn simply so that I can reject just as many stories by diverse writers as by the would be Earnest Hemingways (who I read too, every one). I won’t be able to tell much by a name or the content of a story but I want all writers to feel that they will be read judiciously, where the balance in publishing (in literary journals, reviews, and so on) is weighted currently askew.
The new year will bring more trials and travels (America for one, for a much anticipated wedding AND hopefully readings from me. More details when I have them), more reading and editing and listening and I’m sure joy and grief and dreamy landscapes to photograph and that first collection of mine (have I mentioned it enough yet? It keeps escaping from my fingers) and moves and jobs and writing and writing –
Wishing all of you the best of Hogmanay, whether you spend it out in the cold, cheering fireworks, or inside warm and happy.
Here’s to 2015!
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