Way back at the start of 1998 I made the list of Resolutions below.

(I just want you to know that my handwriting is usually much neater and clearer and more eloquent than this with a lovely, even slant to the right! I may have been tired and emotional when I wrote these.)

An interesting enough list of goals. Let’s consider them in reverse order.

7. Maintain the diary. I’ve kept quite a few diaries over the years and always with each one I vowed I would write something every, single day. Well that never came close to happening. The majority of my diaries are blank pages. Make of that what you will. This was a resolution always DOOMED TO FAIL.

6. Build the pond. Believe it or not I actually built the pond! SUCCESS. It’s at our previous home in Ashgrove. Among other things it attracted striped marsh frogs and rocket frogs that popped so loudly it was like fireworks going off every night. There’s no pond at our present house. But I have been thinking seriously about building one – for the last ten years.

5. Complete Foundations course. This was a Religious Education course that teachers at Marist Ashgrove were encouraged to undertake if you had an RE class, which I did at the time. Everyone who started the course completed it. It was almost impossible to fail. They wanted you to complete it. They didn’t even really care how. I’m pretty sure I’m the only person in the history of Marist Ashgrove who FAILED to complete the course.

4. Read at least 25 books. Last year in 2023 I had my ’23 in 23′ Reading Challenge. I ended up reading 26 books. Back in 1998 when our kids were still at school and I was a full-time English and Economics teacher at Marist and I had heaps of marking, plus Volleyball and debating teams to look after, there’s no way I could ever have read 25 books in a year. Six if I was lucky. Definite FAIL.

3. Marking returned within two weeks. Hahahahahahahahahahahaha! FAIL.

2. Reduce weight to 75 kgs. Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah! FAIL.

(Just to put that last one into perspective, my current weight-related goal is to get down below 90 kgs.)

1. Write and submit ‘Mulberry Tree’ Short Story. Never submitted. Never written. FAIL.

WELL, maybe not so much.

The whole reason for this blog and why that list of goals means something to me, is because of the presence of that 1998 ‘Mulberry Tree’ Short Story resolution.

You see, even though I failed to ever write that short story which was based on a childhood memory of looking for silkworms on the big mulberry tree in the backyard of our family home in Ashgrove, it stayed in my head. And over time it grew into a much larger story.

So much so, that five years later it had morphed into a manuscript for a young adult novel that I sent off to a number of publishers under the title, In Dream Too Deep. The story was eventually accepted by Scholastic Australia and published as THE RUNNING MAN.

My publisher back then Dyan Blacklock (the one who plucked my ms from the slush pile and phoned to tell me that she loved it) predicted that the book would still be around in 20 years. As a first time published author, I couldn’t really imagine something like that ever happening.

But it has.

2024 will mark the 20th anniversary of the Australian publication of The Running Man!

The book is still in print, has been published in seven other countries, and has currently sold over 60,000 copies in Australia and New Zealand alone.

So I’m thinking, maybe Resolution number 1 from 1998 shouldn’t be looked on so much as a FAIL, but more as an EXTREMELY TARDY SUCCESS.

Cheers
Michael

              2014: Tenth Anniversary Edition