I love a new year. It’s not the New Year’s Eve festivities that excite me, although we do have a lovely tradition of spending it with friends having a “high end pot-luck” and drinking a better class of wine than we usually get.

What I love about it are new beginnings and fresh starts. I’ve never been into Spring Cleaning. I tend to do my big cleanouts at the new year. I try new routines, start new books, try new foods. This year I am renewing my commitment to daily meditation. It was during a meditation session last year that I came to the realization that I needed to be writing. I could use some more of that clarity – couldn’t we all?

My office is still a horrible mess, though, and I can’t work in there at the moment because my husband bought scented kitty litter. This is no joke – I have an extremely sensitive sense of smell and difficulty with perfumed items, and this scented litter smells worse to me than plain old cat pee. I had carefully researched and selected an unscented, environmentally sound litter that was great at limiting odor and dust. All was right with my world. And now I can’t get anything done because the cloying smell of this cat litter has driven me from my office! And I can always tell if one of the cats has just used the box because the smell of the litter clings to them. So gross.

So I’ve been trying to write at various other spots around the house while this box of litter gets used up, but it’s slow going. Not a Mermaid is coming along, but not as fast as I would like. But I need to get it finished soon because I’ve got so many ideas for Not a Zombie that I want to work on!