Happy New Year!

HAPPY NEW YEAR 

to every reader of the Scribbles, wherever you might be in the world. Whatever you left behind in 2017, may you be able to face 2018 with love and hope.

It's off to a good start for me already...

Mr Squidge and I don't really celebrate New Year. We've done parties of course, and enjoy being with friends or family, but I don't make New Year's resolutions or view it as the end of something. I see it as a chance to pause for a moment, to take stock of what has happened and look ahead to what might be.

Which is why, last night, with Squidgeling J back in Bristol and Squidgeling T partying with friends, Mr Squidge and I took the opportunity to go and watch a film. We have two cinemas in town; one is a massive complex boasting goodness knows how many screens and all the latest blockbusters. The other is a smaller affair, which to this day I cannot think of as other then The Curzon.

'The Curzon' (it's actually the Odeon nowadays) is a fabulous art deco building which, when I was a kid, had one or possibly two large cinema halls - complete with balcony. We used to go once a year, when my dad's workplace offered their employees' children a chance to see a Christmas film (the best bit was the selection box we were all given on the way out!) As the years passed, the large halls were converted into smaller rooms, and a next-door club was taken into the complex to add even more. So today, there are six screens suitable for various sized audiences.

That's where we headed.

It was New Year's Eve, so it was quiet - about a dozen people watching Pitch Perfect 3, our film of choice. Have to say, it was great - if you've seen the previous films, suffice it to say that Fat Amy takes centre stage in this one; look out for the sausage nunchucks!!

On our way home, we dropped into a pub for a swift half. We had no intention of stopping, but people watching is far too interesting a pastime...and then the DJ put on some 70's disco.

I danced, dear reader! I boogied to those disco beats, alongside twenty-somethings in their short skirts and bra tops and sequins and down-to-the-waist-open-cleavage-showing shirts, happy in my jeans and jumper and red boots, without a scrap of makeup on, and I didn't care! (I often feel like a fish out of water in pubs nowadays, because although I'm sure I'm really twenty-something inside, I certainly don't look it any more!) Talk about impulsive - even Mr Squidge was doing his 'shoulder-shuffle' dance move to welcome 2018...

So anyway, that was good fun.

This morning, I've been pootling on the laptop and what did I discover? More good(ish) news - StarMark and Kingstone had both gone up the rankings on Amazon. We're talking a few hundred places out of potentially millions, but it's an upwards direction. So I did a bit of digging and discovered that the price for StarMark has plummeted in the UK - you can now buy the paperback and the kindle version for under £2 each. Check it out HERE if you haven't read it yet and fancy giving it a go. (Mind you, having gone into the link again, prices range from one penny (!) to about £5 for the paperback now, so I'm not sure what's going on with it. Kindle's still under £2 though.)

And in the US, the kindle price has been dropped too - to under $3. Maybe it'll mean a few more steps in the upwards direction on the Amazon rankings in the coming days? Who knows...

I've got some other good things lined up for the start of 2018, so I will try to blog more frequently and share them with you, because I know I've been a bit lax at posting over recent months. But for now, I'll finish off my first post of the New Year and get back to work on a short story I'm writing...

Bye for now - and once again,

Happy New Year!