Happy New Year

Dear Reader

Happy New Year, I hope your celebrations went well and wish you joy, peace and good health in 2014.

You may have already seen my first small stones post: such a great way of stopping and paying attention to just one small thing. Thank you to the folk at http://www.writingourwayhome.com/small-stones/ for an annual reminder to do this.

I am planning to continue for longer this year, to get past the end of January -at least to do better than last year when the busy-ness of my life in England got in the way very quickly. It would be good to have a collection of small stones that showed the whole year in these wonderful bite sized pieces of writing. I can do it!

Like many of you I would guess I've thought about resolutions, or rather some things I'd like to pay attention to in my life and specifically this year to attend to in my writing life. So my word of 2104 is   attend, to pay attention to one thing at a time, to not try to multitask as much. Small stones are a good way of doing that so I've made a start. My aim is for less of listening to the radio and drinking my coffee and reading or knitting or catching up with Twitter -to focus on one thing much more.

Paying more attention fits with a small but growing interest I have in the value of things done slowly. So far this week I've done some slow shopping -queueing for cheese at a market stall, some slow cooking in the log burnung stove and a little bit of slow thinking. I'd like to extend this idea into some poems ....

I also aim to respond more to the blogs I read, and hope that others do the same on this blog. After all I can't expect responses to what I write unless I respond to others -anyway that's the plan.

Off now to finish slowly clearing up after a long (yes, slow) New Year's supper.