A New Year

I almost typed in 'Happy New Year' for the title, but to tell the truth, I'm a bit late, and enough people have said it elsewhere.

I'm torn between the desire to thrash out my thoughts about the coming year onto the page, and sparing you from having to read them. I'm getting a bit bored of my internal dialogue. It sounds something like this:

Inner voice: "Blimey, there is so much in my brain about the coming year, I should blog about it."

Other inner voice: "But millions of people all over the world have already done that. It's the 5th of January for heaven's sake. People are bored already."

Inner voice: "But I haven't been bored by reading those kinds of posts written by my friends."

Other inner voice: "But you'd be writing about your year-to-come and who the hell wants to read about that anyway?"

Inner voice: "Hang on a minute, aren't you just my inner critic wearing a cunning disguise?"

Other inner voice (slightly lower now): This is not a fake beard, and there are no women here.

Inner voice: Fake beard? Who are you trying to pass yourself off as anyway?

Other inner voice: Stone her!

Rinse and repeat.

Yes, that is exactly what has been on loop in my head for the last day whenever I've felt the desire to post. That's why I'm a writer. If I didn't write, they'd need to lock me up.

Anyhoo, it doesn't get away from the fact that I have a heavy brain and a need to wring something of it out. It's happening today as I am recovering from the flu, which sadly has become an annual event now. But being laid up on the sofa for many days did give me a long time to think, and to make some very difficult decisions.

Limbo

December was a very odd month. I found myself having more time and significantly less money than anticipated, so the emphasis of the impending Christmas to be hosted at my house for the first time changed rapidly to "Homespun with effort to express love, rather than spangly gifts."

I spent a lot more time with my son than usual, nursing him and then my husband through the flu which I eventually caught. But all the Christmas stuff went brilliantly.

Throughout the entire month however, there was a monster lurking in the shadowy recesses. Yup, it's your friend and mine (drum roll) The Anxiety Demon! And he was big and fat and wondering around my mind like he owned the place.

He'd been feasting on all the events of the previous three months and the promise of 2011. He saw that November in which I almost completely burned out, sprinkled some salt on it and gobbled it up. It was followed with a nice dollop of money worries, with sautéed illness on the side, with a beautiful dessert of being able to withdraw from the world thanks to the Christmas season – the perfect base for all fears to grow from.

Nicely fattened up, he spouted day and night about how 2011 is going to be the scariest year ever. Not just one book being published, but two? Really? How interesting. He coughed up horrible "What if?" hairballs all over the place:

What if no-one likes them?

What if you get bad reviews?

What if no-one bothers to review them at all?

What if the sales are so bad they're the only two books you'll ever have published?

What if you can't do it all?

What if you get so stressed and tired you can't finish the trilogy?

I could go on, but you get the idea.

With flu and that smelly beast knocking around, it wasn't nice. But I had the time to think, and I realised that I have only one thing to do in 2011:

Try my best.

I'm not aiming for perfection (well, that's a lie, I am a recovering perfectionist after all, I'm just recognising that I shouldn't have that as the standard) and I'm not putting pressure on myself to sell a million books, and I am not going to try and please every single reader out there. All of these are impossible.

But deciding to try my best has forced me to look long and hard at how the last four months or so of 2010 went, and it became clear to me that trying my best would require more time for the writing and the promoting. So I had to make some very tough, scary decisions.

I'm not going to detail them here. What I wanted to describe is a sense of a turning point. I realised that 2011 is likely to be my scariest year ever. The dream is coming true. That's scary. And I realised that I have to make a commitment to my writing life and career in a way I never have before.

This is serious now. I'm at the stage now where writing is not a vocation that can be crammed in around the edges for me any more. It has to take priority and the only thing in my life that I am prepared to let distract me from it is my son. And my husband, but he's behind me 100% anyway.

If I don't commit now, I can't give this my best. I know that being an author is absolutely what I have to be. Right down to my bone marrow, I feel that this is career I am best built for.

So that's it. 2011 in a nutshell: I'll show up, do my best and hope that my books find their way to the people who will love them.