My previous New Year posts have been focussed on happy things like the new book/books I’d published during the past year. Sadly, this one isn’t. There is no way for me to avoid mentioning the obvious elephant in the room. I didn’t publish a new book during 2024. There should have been a book, there would have been a book, but my writing time has been hit hard during 2024.

I’ve explained before that I’ve had to make a lot of changes to my writing process and my website because of AI harvesting. Something I haven’t explained before is that concerned readers have alerted me to a human being trying to make money from my name and my books. I thought that person would soon give up, but they are still continuing after six months despite multiple warnings from others. This situation could threaten my own ability to make money from my writing, so I’ve decided I have to get involved myself.

I’m explaining this now because the person hasn’t responded to contacts from me. That means you may see something online about me moving on to take legal action. I don’t want any innocent parties getting worried by this, so I want to make it clear that this is only about the one person persistently trying to make money from my name and my books. If that one person is reading this, please reply to my email of 9 Dec or use the contact form on my website to talk to me and solve this. Everyone else, please help me out by ignoring the whole thing.

Moving rapidly on to more cheerful subjects, I started a Patreon in the summer. Subscribers are able to sign up to support my writing, and have the fun of getting advance views of short stories and chapters of longer pieces to brighten the long gaps between published books. This is going much better than I expected, and my subscribers are hopefully enjoying it as much as I am.

It’s now time for my traditional New Year Story. I don’t dare to post unpublished stories on my website any longer because of AI harvesting, so I did posts and sent out a newsletter saying that I’d be using the free tier of Patreon to make the New Year story available for you all to read.

If you were hiding down in a cellar somewhere and missed that information, then the New Year story for 2025 is set in the Hive Future. My current Patreon subscribers will get access automatically. Everyone else just needs to go to my Patreon at www.patreon.com/JanetEdwards and click on the Join For Free button. Once you’ve joined as a free member, you should be able to see a post giving you a link and password to read the New Year story.

I posted a general writing update on both Patreon and the Coming Next page of my website on 3rd December. The only new thing to add is that I expect to be suffering from building work during January. Please be patient if I’m slow responding to comments, or screaming about pneumatic drills and holes in the floor.

Happy New Year!

Janet Edwards