For me, January felt like it took a long time to get going. Perhaps it’s because I took so much time off over Christmas, then returned to my desk and promptly suffered the double-whammy of a tax return and a bout of Covid. Thankfully clear of both now, and I’ve spent most of the rest of the month scheming, pitching and generally getting my house in order for the year ahead.

Anyway, I thought I might start doing a quick round-up of each month, picking out a few highlights across six different themes: roaming, reading, writing, wearing, using and learning.

Roaming

Rather like travel tends to feel more fulfilling when you’ve got an eventual destination in mind (however arbitrary that might be), planning a good day out is usually easier if you’ve got something to hang it off. For a long time, I was a collector of trig points, and the pursuit of new ones led me to explore plenty of new areas (or undiscovered corners of familiar ones).

Last year, I reached 50 trigs and decided to put that particular hobby on the back burner for the time being – but I found I missed having something to clock up. Having toyed with follies or neolithic monuments, I finally settled on bridges, and have started my new log of these with Bow Bridge near Rievaulx and the Cover Bridge in Wensleydale.

Reading

My favourite book of the month was The Scar by China Miéville. Sprawling fantasy epics aren’t absolutely my normal fare, but after having dabbled in some of his shorter works (The City and the City is still one of my absolute favourites), I had a go at the first volume in Miéville’s Bas-Lag series last year, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Where Perdido Street Station was set in the sprawling city of New Crobuzon, The Scar mostly takes place on the high seas. It’s one of those where the storyline sort of takes second place to the extraordinary world-building. You’re not always sure where it’s going, but you’re so immersed in the vastness of his imagination that you don’t really mind.

Writing

In the last few days I’ve been busy writing up a jaunt on the Berwickshire coast path last summer. I know memoirs of coastal paths have a bad rep at the moment, but fear not – I promise this one is actually true. No life-changing experiences here, though Mouse the poodle did manage to have his first night sleeping in a hike tent without trying to bite me.

It’ll be up on the WildBounds journal in due course. In the meantime, have a look at their lovely new article map.

Wearing

Enthused by my piece on beret wearing the other week, I’ve been really enjoying my Czech Service Star. Warm, comfortable and easy to carry off, it’s accompanied me on most of my jaunts out on the moors this month.

Using

Just before Christmas, I finally got around to having some better tyres put on my old 2002 Freelander. The wheels on this model are an unusual size, so there wasn’t much choice in the mid-range all-terrain bracket, and I ended up going for some Davanti Terratoura MTs. They’re fairly aggressive off-road tyres, but I was impressed with how much better they held the road during the snow dumps at the beginning of the month.

If I had my time again, though, I might have waited until after Christmas before having them fitted. I spent a decent chunk of the festive period on motorways and dual carriageways zipping between Leeds, Whitby, Ripon and Calderdale, and they do start to get rather noisy when you cross the 50mph mark. Thankfully settling down a bit now…

Learning

My second novel, The Porcelain Poet, came out just before Christmas. I did very little marketing for the first book – reasoning that my time was better spent writing the next one – but this time around I’ve been experimenting with promo sites.

There are quite a lot of these about, but essentially they’re email lists for prolific readers looking for heavily discounted ebooks – so you set up a 99p Kindle countdown deal or whatever, then pay one of these companies to feature you on their daily mail-out to potentially thousands of subscribers. The most famous and lucrative one is Bookbub, but they’re very selective and expensive, so I started out by trying a few of the smaller ones like Robin Reads, Fussy Librarian and Bargainbooksy.

Costs were between £20 and £50 each, and I promoted the first book in my series – The Tin Face Parade – reducing the price of the ebook temporarily in the hopes that people who bought it on the cheap might then be tempted to buy the sequel full price. I didn’t break even, but I did clock up 60+ new readers, mostly from the US. My mini-campaign was an interesting experiment, and the conversion rate worked much better than Amazon’s own ad system.

It was only last week – and the spike in sales continued to a lesser extent over the weekend – so I’ll keep an eye on my dashboard with interest over the next week or so. The downside is that I’m now receiving more AI-generated scam email slop to my website than ever before, but I suppose it all comes with the territory.