Happy New Year everybody!!!! I hope the year has started brightly for you all. I had a quiet night in last night -- I hit the sack before midnight -- and spent this morning on the grounds of my old secondary school, chasing after my two kids, pretending to be a gorilla. The wild, exciting life of an author!!!! :-)

I know 2021 wasn't the complete return to normal that we were all hoping for, but hey, for most of us I think it was certainly a big improvement over the nightmare that was 2020, and with luck (and lot of vaccinations! I was fortunate enough to get my third, booster jab shortly before Christmas, and I STRONGLY recommend them!!) this coming year will be even better.

I'd normally have the latest issue of my Shanville Monthly newsletter good to go on the first of a new month, but for once I'm running late with it! The Christmas season is partly to blame -- I've been taking things fairly easy over the last couple of weeks -- but mainly it's the fault of a WiFi crash in Shanville! Yesterday, for no discernible reason, my WiFi stopped working, and my internet provider wasn't able to fix it over the phone, and instead had to schedule a call-out. That won't happen until near the end of the coming week, so it looked for a while that I was going to be VERY late with the first newsletter of 2022! ( I could have cobbled it together using my phone, but that would have been extremely fiddly and would have taken ages.) But this morning, again for no discernible reason, the WiFi started working again!! I've been working swiftly since it came back, and most of the newsletter is in place, but it won't be properly completed until tomorrow, and I won't announce it until Monday.

If you want to check out the still-forming newsletter (as I said, most of it's in place) click here: https://darrenshan.com/news/shanville-monthly

In the meantime, here are three of the final photos taken of the Shan clan in 2021. The first was taken in Milano (known as Pizza Express in the UK) yesterday evening, when we enjoyed our last meal of the year. The other two were taken back home, a few hours later, when we celebrated the New Year's Eve with a few sparklers -- not the type of impressive fireworks show that we once used to relish (we have a flat in London just before the London Eye, which is famous for its New Year's Eve fireworks), but we had a whale of a time regardless.

Once again -- HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! Have fun and be safe, and let's try and look forward to the next 364 days -- who knows what freakish wonders they might bring... :-)