I love making new year resolutions. But not everyone does.
So this is not to make you feel guilty if (like me) you have yet to decide all those ways to make a better version of yourself in 2024.
What with Christmas, multiple family birthdays, and New Year celebrations, I have also been celebrating a very big achievement. Despite my not officially having a new book out this year, my 2024 book The Floating Witch Mystery has been sneaking into shops! So I have been making the most of that at the end of 2023.
I am hugely grateful that I have the privilege of having six books published and I get to see my book in bookshops.
The truth is that the downside to writing is that many, many writers find their first book will always be their most successful . . . and it gets increasingly difficult to get any more books published and keep the writing dream going.
And I really, really don’t want this to be my last book ever!
The Floating Witch Mystery hits the bookshops!
Celebrating your wins I think should be one of everyone’s New Year Resolutions.
Being grateful and counting your blessings I feel is very important.
So I am proud to share this picture of me and what I found in Blackwells Westgate!
I am super super excited to see my first copies of The Floating Witch Mystery.
Lovely to see these beauties brimful of mystery and magic. Hope they all find new homes. I will be dropping into a few more bookshops and I am hugely grateful for their support.
How a new book reminds me to make those plans for 2024
Back to the fact that I seem to have an inbox full of people making great resolutions for the ways they want to improve or succeed in 2024.
And I haven’t even thought about mine yet!
This isn’t because I don’t make them. I find new year resolutions really work well for me.
What should be my plans?
I guess new year is a good time to ask myself what my plans and goals are for the year ahead. Yes, I also write them down - as I find it a good way to record and remember what I set out to do.
If you don’t have any dreams - how can those dreams come true?
So I find goal setting is a big part of my new year ritual. I even made a short series of YouTube chats about it. Follow the link if you want to find out more about how I set my writing goals.
Why I think having the right goals is important
What tends to work for me is to have quite small goals, ones that are about changing my daily habits, or perspective, or mindset. I also try to make sure they are not all about me! Thinking of ways to help my local community, writing community, or some of my bigger goals - like supporting reading for pleasure . . . they all come into it.
So I think maybe one of the reasons I have not yet made my new year resolutions is probably because I do think quite hard about them.
If I make a resolution it is usually about something I want to explore as much as improve. It is part of my quest and my curiosity about life. Although yes, part of it is also about making a better version of myself every year.
This Substack newsletter is one of the results of last year’s resolutions
I am not great at shouting about my books, even though I am very proud of them and am lucky to have some very supportive readers who I wanted to connect with more.
I love writing and I know a lot of people would love to be a published writer. And I love to support other people’s goals. But writing is also hard! So deciding what to share isn’t straightforward.
I always have a feeling of not wanting to moan about the downsides (every job has its downsides) . . . while also not only sharing the good stuff and making it look like it’s all living the dream and being a writer is all book launches and invitations to do signings (those are the upsides!).
Keeping the writing journey afloat
I am currently without an agent and The Floating Witch Mystery is my last contracted book . . . so I aim to share a bit more about the steps I will be taking to keep this writing journey afloat ( I hope)!
And because my goals and my interests are about more than just writing, learning resilience and gratitude, I do have some plans for 2024 - and I will let you know soon. Some of them might even be very EXCITING!!
So my first message of 2024 is a huge THANK YOU to all of my readers and supporters. Because I am HUGELY GRATEFUL that you are part of my community.
If you have read one of my books, or have read my newsletter, shared it, or bought one of my review recommendations, it all helps keep the spirit of stories alive.
THANK YOU.
I have loved joining Substack and am starting to read an awful lot of other Substackers.
I am grateful to The Shit No One Tells You About Writing and a piece from Virginia Kantra which sums up what I think will be one of my New Year Resolutions:
“Silent Cal”, the thirtieth president of the United States, is not every writer’s go-to for inspiration, but I’ve kept a quote of his pinned on the bulletin board by my computer for almost twenty-five years: “Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”
I want to leave you these thoughts, because I want to ask something from you - I would love you to share what you’d like to see more of in this newsletter and from me.
I am thinking of celebrating other writers by introducing interviews.
I want to find a way to turn my multiple rejections into something positive for the environment (and will involve trees).
How interested are you all in the crummy realities of the day to day life of an only mildly successful author? Or would you prefer more writing tips and reviews of great books I am reading?
And I hope you will not mind being bombarded with my celebrations of The Floating Witch Mystery and may I just remind you - it is officially published on Jan 4.
Can there be a better start to a year? Thanks for celebrating with me.
Happy New Year to you all - and do share your own thoughts on your resolutions!
nicki