Making plans for a shiny new year...

Yay - had a letter yesterday from Random House NZ to say that the 'Friends' themed anthology of children's short stories including my story "A Passport to Friends" is to be published October 2011. After stories were selected in January 2009 for a proposed publication date of October that year the project went dark and I confess I thought it probably unlikely it would be resurrected so it was a wonderful surprise to find it was going to come out after all. This is my 10th short story to be published and I think its time I developed a short story writing workshop and I plan to work on this next year. I have been thinking quite a bit on next year and what I hope to achieve and expect to happen. The first quarter of 2011 will be dominated by finishing my world war 2 novel and working towards the Spinning Tales conference (www.spinningtales.co.nz have you registered yet?? Pitches are limited and everyone registered so far has signed up to pitch). The second Pick 'n' Mix collection will be out in February, my picture book is due mid year and the Random anthology in October so there will be some promotion and other activities associated with those. I am currently working on finding a loving home for my YA and as several friendly folk have read it I intend to do some minor tweaking as a result of their feedback but this is not a big job. The only project remaining incomplete at the moment is my YA bodice ripper and I will probably carry on with that over the course of the year. I am thinking of putting Jack the Viking: Magnetic North out as an e-book and if i do this it will be in the first half of the year. In the second half of the year I would like to go to Wellington and hopefully visit some schools and promote the new books down there. I'm thinking maybe August/September. Hoping too to fit a family holiday in there somewhere and will probably sign up for another university paper as I work towards completing the diploma in Childrens Literature. There will also be a new Fabo project to participate in and the final Harry Potter movie to see. And thats all I have planned for 2011. I am really looking forward to having the current project completed and a bit of free time once this is done. But there are still a number of free spots if you would like to book me in for something. What are you planning for 2011?