New Beginnings

by Elizabeth

This is my last post of this year (well, duh), and I had planned a big gala animal expose involving felines and fowl, and I promise to write that post soon. But this morning, with my big coffee cup before me and my son gleefully Star Warring in the next room, I'm feeling contemplative, and so frosting and feathers will have to await another day.

Recently, somewhere (and I guess this is total copyright infringement*), I read that no matter how old we get, September always feels like a fresh start, as does January. I'm no different than the woman who wrote that in that regard, even though Texas sends kids to school in the heat of August rather than the more civilized after-Labor Day that harbored my end-of-summer. New Year's is no different. It feels fresh, new, rife with potential (if only one could escape the battering of cliche I just succumbed to myself). A chance. Opportunity. To do things right that might have fallen down, or behind, or even off the year before.

Anyone who's been reading this blog the last few months knows there are exciting things going on here at WWW. Agents and contracts and manuscripts nearing completion, things we were all hopeful for when we began the blog. I'm actually not in that class right at this minute; although I was one of the "getting close to finishing" crowd, my WIP has taken a turn and I have a lot of work ahead of me. Which is a good thing, in fact; the changes required are making it a richer, better, more satisfying story, both to write and hopefully read, and I am not yet mourning the tens of thousands of words that are about to land in the trash file. They'll be replaced with better ones, and for that I am glad. But it's still exciting to be in the midst of these women who are marching toward publication, and the guy at the back of the band is still in that number. I'm not counting myself out, not by a long shot. Someone has to be last, right? If it turns out to be me, well, then it just means I have five potential bestselling authors who might be willing to blurb this caboose.

But it is a fresh start, and one for which I am hopeful, and positive, and crossing my fingers. I have a semi-major birthday in a few months, and like September and January, those milestone personal holidays do something to us, make us ambitious and eager. Unpublished writers have to rely on themselves for deadlines, and I guess this is one for me, which is a good thing, because like many of us, I'm not the best at putting the gun to my own head. (Ew.)

Three days from now the calendar will turn. New possibilities await. But that is always true, with every tick of the clock. Somehow, though, for so many of us, that last page of the calendar--really, that first page of the calendar--harbors hope and determination and promise.

Here's to a great, a wonderful, an amazing and successful and accomplished 2012. To all of us here, and everyone reading. Let's go.




*but not really