Welcome back yet again, Nancy Jardine, to set my new year off in style! And thank you for this little lesson from a different culture…

Thank you, Jane, for giving me this opportunity to visit you so early in the New Year of 2015.

Days have passed since the bells struck midnight on January 1^st and we entered the New Year. The frills and fanfare of the holiday season may now be over, but one of the big things I love about greeting in a New Year to come is that I have lots of well-wishing from friends and relatives. These have such a heartening ‘good feel’ factor about them and they’re a wonderfully positive looking forward to the coming months. In return, since the 1^st of January, I’ve sent wishes for good health, wealth and happiness to my family and Facebook/internet friends and I don’t think it’s too late for me to wish that for my host, Jane, and to extend it to you, her blog readers.

Good luck with projects that are due in 2015 is also a greeting that I’ve been sharing with many of my friends.

I have to confess, though, that something I don’t have such a personal ‘feel good’ factor about is that many of my world-wide internet friends share their greetings days in advance of those bells proclaiming the turn of the year. Even though I appreciate that time-differences play a great part in this, I can’t bring myself to send my own ‘Happy New Year’ greetings till after the bells.

Does that mean that I’m a mean person? I certainly hope not, but when I was growing up in Glasgow, Scotland, it was thought to be bad luck if you said those words too early i.e. before the turn of the year. If someone wasn’t likely to see you over the turn of the year yet wanted to send you some kind of greeting then they would say ‘All the best when it comes’. If they met you in the street, or in some other situation some days later in January, that was when ‘Happy New Year’ words were exchanged. If you’ve had a returned greeting from me before the 1^st of January arrived, then the words were likely to be something like the above ‘all the best…’.

I’ve managed to shake of some of the older traditions I was brought up with and have embraced some new traditions recently created– like not having a ‘steak-pie’ dinner at home on January 1^st with extended family and instead now having an Indian curry at a restaurant en masse – yet the Happy New Year greetings one sticks in my craw. I’m not a superstitious person, but I can’t bring myself to wittingly wish ‘Bad Luck’ on anyone.

Good luck is something all authors need if they want to have their novels come to the attention of hundreds of readers – good luck partnered with those heavy doses of time spent on promotional advertising.

So I’ll conclude with wishing Jane, and her blog readers, Happy New Year and a heap of Good Luck in 2015.

Nancy Jardine writes contemporary mysteries, historical adventures and time-travel adventure for the YA market.  Her novels are available to buy from Amazon, B &N, and many other internet ebook sites.

You can find Nancy Jardine on  Twitter: @nansjar , and on the following websites:

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