Welcome to the Creative Pen podcast. I'm Joanna Penn, thriller author and creative entrepreneur,

bringing you interviews, inspiration and information on writing, publishing options and marketing ideas for your book.

You can find the episode show notes, your free author blueprint and lots more information at

TheCreativepen.com. And that's Penn with a double N. And here's the show.

Hello creatives. I'm Joanna Penn. And this is episode number 594 of the podcast. And it is Monday the 27th of December 2021, as I record this,

from Auckland in New Zealand, back in a heat wave, and I am in the cupboard again.

So I hope you had a happy Christmas and happy holidays, and now I guess everyone's in that sort of between the Christmas

and New Year period so I hope you're getting some time to relax. So in today's show,

I'm sharing my roundup for the year, the good, the bad and the ugly. Well, in fact, the bad first.

So here we go.

Not quite the year we hoped for.

Review of my 2021 creative business goals.

So as we all look back at the past year, it feels like it's flown by,

but also that time has warped in a way,

and it feels like we've been stuck in this pandemic for much longer than we expected. Ever the Optimist, I wrote on 1st of January 2021. I'm expecting it to be

at least a full pandemic year from March 2020 to March 2021, but I am really hoping to be back in the world in the second half of the

year, which is hilarious. I thought that. I also intended 2021 to be a year of expansion, creatively in

terms of what I write, mentally in terms of things I think about, and physically in terms of my health

and where I travel. So this year did not turn out, as we all hoped, did it? I think we all

hoped that it would be over. Of course, it's not. As I record this, it's certainly not.

The UK is in the Omicron. Everyone's getting the Omicron fun times. So part of me doesn't

want to even do this roundup because I don't want to relive a lot of this year. But I have always

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