Taking stock in November

Do you have Novemberitis? It's a thing, really. I reckon it's a thing. In November, you can start to get restless because really you're running out of time for whatever goal you were hoping to achieve this year (to finally make peace with your mother, to stop hating kale, to get that three-book deal). You can see December looming and you know it's going to whizz by and then bloody hell ... what happened to 2016? Some of us will have had successes. Some of us will have had nothing but discouragement. Some of us will have had small victories. The fact is, we're all trying hard. And for writers, that's really what counts. The main thing is the writing, the doing, the learning, the improving. The getting published bit feels so vitally important, but really it's the process that matters most of all. So if all that happened this year was that you wrote and re-wrote and edited and maybe submitted, plus you ran a household or a sales team, fed the cat and phoned your sister and ate some steamed greens now and then - well surely that's a successful year. And success feeds on success. Writing seems to me to be a constant apprenticeship; to write is to be forever learning. So every day spent writing pays off, adds to the next day. Nothing is wasted, not even the words we throw away. I have a mild case of Novemberitis, but I know the best remedy. #amwriting :)