It’s Christmas Eve and I’m sat at my folks’ house, surrounded by my family and sipping mulled wine. Life is better than it has any right to be and I’m feeling hugely grateful.

I’ve just received an early Christmas present (a lovely comment on my blog) from Charlotte Rains Dixon and headed over to her blog. She has posted a lovely article about light and how lucky so many of us are.

It got me thinking about the year past and how much has happened, particularly in the last few months. Before September I was someone who had written a book and done nothing with it, only known that I wanted to. In September, spurred on by my wife, I began to do something. It began to with planning, lots and lots of thinking and researching.

This led us first to Joanna Penn and CJ Lyons, who, through a fantastic online course, helped us lay the foundations. Using the contents of the course and my wife’s experience running her own business, Amovita, we created a website and organised the rest of the year. Since then it’s been constant, a massive, exciting, inspiring learning curve that will come to fruition next year with the publishing of the first book and novella.

Continuing the writing was easy for me, something that I loved to do. The big stretch for me, and this is something Elizabeth has more than alluded to in her ‘Mrs Cairns Writes’ blogs, was the blogging and social media that accompanied it. I could quite happily be described as an introvert.

However, after a few days on twitter I discovered something quite wonderful. People are really nice! The thing I’m most grateful for over the last few months, (aside from my daughter giving me a hug after work, my wife giving me a kiss and chocolate-based snacks) are the people I’ve met on twitter.

Some have been only fleeting encounters, ‘hi and thanks for following, RT’ing etc.’ Others have been real conversations, a link formed that adds something extra and lovely to my day.

So, this blog, aside from being to wish you all a wonderful Christmas, is a brief Hi and thanks to the people I’ve ‘met’ in the last four months. It’s been a pleasure, and here’s to next year.