Happy New Year

I sincerely hope everyone has a great 2011, or at least one that does not suck. A year can last a long time (up to a year, I hear) although in hindsight, they often seem to fly by. Lots can happen in a year. Good people can be stricken with an unexpected illness and/or die. We can lose our jobs. Relationships can go down the toilet. In other words, there's a lot that we don't necessarily have much control over, and are things that just happen as the natural order of things.

But...

There are a lot of things we can control, like what we eat, how we react to and treat each other, whether we exercise or not - and for us writers, we can either take the time to write or not. We can try to improve by learning and studying the craft, reading a lot and figuring out how other authors create the work they do (or at least see why certain scenes work, or bits of dialog or characterization work). There's that old saying about preparation meeting opportunity equaling luck, or something like that, and that seems to hold true for me more often than not.  The more that I'm active in the pursuit of my writing career, the more that good things seem to happen. Becoming a successful writer is certainly not a passive activity.

So my resolution for 2011 is to write.
Oh, and cut down on the double cheeseburgers...