Champions adventures and where it all went wrong

 Well... what a day it had been. My parents were season ticket holders and got to watch Andrea Boccelli belting out Nessum Dorma at the King Power Stadium as Leicester lifted the trophy. They had no idea who he was, which really wound me up because I love classic music but that was the old season, and the new season came along with UEFA Champions League football.

We made easy work of the group stage, Marc Albrighton gaining a place in Leicester City folklore and history as he became the scorer of the first ever goal in CL for the Foxes.

However, league form was a concern, and a 2-1 defeat in the first leg of the round of 16 away in Seville was too much for the owners. Claudio Ranieri was sacked and the assistant manager, Craig Shakespeare put in charge.

We overcame Seville on a great night to progress to the Quarter finals, actually becoming the sole English team to make it that far. Not bad as people had been saying we would be an utter embarrassment. However, Spanish giants Atheltico Madrid were a step to far for the club and we went out 2-1 on aggregate.

League form picked up and we finished 12th, which wasn’t too bad considering that, at one point, relegation was a serious threat.

 

2016/17 also became a disaster for my writing. I was happily ploughing through the fourth book in the Alex Hayden Chronicles when I discovered that I could not find my USB drive one evening. Having decided not to panic, I waited until the following morning to check my work desk but alas, that is when the panic set it. I had lost it, and it contained all my work that I had written.

Devasted was not the word for it.

Fortunately, I had most of my writers group homework assignments printed out, and several of them had been emailed to beta readers so I recovered all bar one of those. I had my books on email to my editor so again, could recover them, but I had lost the work on Dragonfire (the fourth book), or so I had thought.

After telling Bex, my wonderful editor, about the loss, she sent me the work I had already emailed through to her. I had lost several chapters work but at least, I wasn’t starting from scratch.

I did have several other works in progress that I had not sent to her, as they were not in any fit stage, so those were consigned to history.

Fast forward three months, and a lot of new chapters, and I found out that I was a very slow learner about lessons in life. Plugging my new USB drive into my laptop, it came up with a message that no-one wants to see… drive corrupted!

I was back to square one.

Writing-wise I became depressed. I continued with my homework assignments for the group as we had agreed that once we reached 25, we were going to release an anthology. But my own writing went on hold for months. I tried to restart but whatever I wrote was never as good as I remember having already written and lost.

So, all in all, this was a pretty crappy year! Surely the next year could only get better!