This is a special New Year for me. There is something genuinely, thrillingly new for me to celebrate in my writing life.

This is the first year I don’t have to wearily resolve to get published. The first year I don’t have to make that resolution as shadows of doubt inhabit my mind, knowing how many times before I have failed.

New Year’s Day with its resolutions, birthday wishes and candles, coins in wells, they all mocked me for years on end. I made those wishes, committed to those targets, promised to do better, and always another year slid by and the goal was unmet, the wish unrealized, the bell unrung.

It wears on you after a while.

Before the years of the “getting published” wish there was a decade and more of resolving to “finish the book”, when I had no idea that what I was really wishing for was to finish a first draft, and that “finishing the book” as I understood it was a total understatement of the work needed to finish a draft and then transform it into publishable form.

But all that is behind me now. The resolution I made last year, uttered in ferocious desperation (not for the first time), has been held to. The goal has been met, the wish realized, and the bell most definitely rung.

In 2017 I published my first novel, The Thief and The Demon. I am very proud of it. I’m overjoyed to introduce it to you, and the world. I hope you like it. If you do, please leave a review!

So this year, for the first time in my adult life, I don’t have to make a New Year’s resolution with shades of doubt in mind. I’m free to dream again.

The Thief and The Demon is but another step down The Long Road. I want to go further, do more, be better.

In 2018 I hope to complete a first draft, edit, and publish The Killer and The Dead. I don’t resolve to do that with ferocious desperation this time, but with calm. Make it or not, I’m doing something new, something fresh. Like the year, I’m reborn in optimism, and it feels fabulous.

What a difference a year makes.

So here is my New Year’s message for writers and artists of all stripes: keep dreaming, keep working, and keep taking just one more step down the long road toward to your goals. Let this be the year you get there, so that next year you too can discover the odd high of not making the same old tired resolution, but setting yourself a new goal, and feeling free as a result.

Happy New Year everyone!