Today, I am 30. Just three more years and I’ll be an adult hobbit at last.

And to celebrate that, I must remember to mention, ALL my books are currently 0.99 on the Kindle store. Get me a birthday present by getting yourself something to read. Go on. Get on with it.

It seems like quite a long time, thirty years, but given that for most of it I was a child it also seems like barely any time at all. It’s only in the last decade or so that I’ve done ‘real life things’, or so it feels. I’ve studied, I’ve travelled, I’ve worked, I’ve gotten married. And soon (hopefully) I will actually have a house, a process throughout which I keep thinking I need a real adult’s approval for every bit of red tape, only to remember with crushing horror that I am technically a real adult. (Which doesn’t stop me consulting my parents at every possible juncture.)

And I’ve written things. Six published books is pretty good going for 30, I’d say, and that’s not even mentioning all the unpublished ones that lurk on my hard drive awaiting finishing, rewriting, and sanity. This year has already been a big one for me creatively, finishing The Owl in the Labyrinth – and thusa trilogy, which I have to remind myself is objectively reasonably impressive – and publishing a few short stories into the bargain. I’m quite pleased that I accidentally lined up that milestone with the milestone of me getting arbitrarily older. It feels right, somehow. If only I’d written one Boiling Seas book per decade.

A small part of me feels like some sort of momentous goal is in order, some change to things, some grand gesture of ‘I am an adult now’. But then I am buying a house, I think that’s good enough. Because I feel no older. The only times I really feel like an adult at all is when I’m surrounded by small children at work, and even then I’m building LEGO with them so ‘adult’ is stretching things a bit. It’s just the height difference, really. For every Real Grownup Thing like buying a house, there are ten moments when I buy myself children’s trading cards, or play various forms of make-believe with my friends, or am most excited, among all my birthday presents, by this really cool knife my sister found.

Because I’ve grown older but by no means grown up, and I fundamentally never truly intend to. In thirty years time when I write my next big birthday blog post, presumably using the power of my mind to dictate telepathically to some sort of robot scribe, I hope that I still won’t have. I am a fantasist, in my writing and my life; I am and always will be a big kid, eschewing the serious for the silly, and I like it that way.

Who knows, maybe Tolkien was right, and 33 is the real age when you mature. I guess I’ll find out in three more years. But I don’t expect to.

Now, I’m off to play board games and drink alcohol, which is one of the only ‘grownup’ things I will accept as quite a good idea.