A Date With Kate - Resolutions?

Happy New Year.

I hope 2013 will be a wonderful, happy, loving warm and successful year for  you.

Successful – ah, now that’s the word that most people will trip up over. What makes  a year ‘successful’ for you? How will  you make a success of the 365 days that are coming up (well – 361 now seeing as it’s already the 4^th  of January.)

Success is such a personal thing – or it should be., If you judge yourself in the terms of ‘success’ as defined by the world,  then you’re probably setting yourself up for a fall. Only the greatest and most dramatic achievements seem to be given the accolade of success in the newspapers and magazines stories.  Money, power, popularity  all seem to be seen as success – but for me these too often come at personal cost and missing out on things that really matter.,  We can’t really have it all  and keep a balance.

And if we judge ourselves by others’ standards then we can be setting ourselves up for failure – in life or in writing. If I was to compare myself with some of my friends  who are writers, then my output would look pretty paltry. This past year has been   hmm – hunts for the appropriate word -  complicated  (now there’s a nice understatement)  and as a result  I have only  one new book lined up for 2013 – as yet. If I compare that with  the output of other writers, then I could be kicking myself and  telling myself I’m not achieving very much. But  there have been times when the accomplishment  of even that has been an achievement.  When you look at the books lined up on a shelf, all with shiny new covers and the author’s name proudly displayed, it’s not possible to see whether this particular story was written in peace and millpond quiet or in the days when the waves of life threatened to swamp the author as she was writing it.  What matters is that it was written.   

There’s  a saying that success if getting up nine times, if you’ve been knocked down  eight. It’s the getting up one more time that makes you a success. And that is so important in the writing world, in your career as a writer, whether you’re at the beginning of it, still hoping to be published – or have been writing for years. If you’ve had your latest submission rejected, if you can’t think of a single new idea, if your last book got bad reviews, or didn’t sell terribly well – are you going to give in and never write again?

Not if you’re really a writer.

There’s that other quote I’m always repeating – Writers write, everyone else makes excuses.

So here we are at the start of a new year – what are you going  to do? List lots of aims and objectives?  Plan a set of resolutions?  Embark on the project  of making a ‘new you’?  Not me. I’ve said it before and I’ll keep on saying it – I don’t think anyone really  has  an ‘old you’ that is so bad that you need a whole new one.  So resolutions ? No, not for me.

But resolution – now that’s something else.
Resolution: the mental state or quality of being resolved or resolute; firmness of purpose.

Being resolute will get you a long way. It will give you the strength and conviction to take yourself forwards, to  get back in the saddle, to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start all over again.

Resolution will help you tackle the barriers you find in your way, it will give you the strength to accept rejections and learn from them, to put them aside and start afresh – to keep on keeping on. Because that is the only way you are ever going to be a success as a writer – by writing.

Here’s another quote on success:

Success is a journey, not a destination. The doing is often more important than the outcome. -- Arthur Ashe

So I’m not going in for any resolutions, but I am going to be resolute.  Life is bound to throw a few more mountains or potholes in my way  - it has a nasty habit of doing that.  But if I’m resolute I will keep on doing what matters most to me.  And doing it to the best of my ability at the time.

One of the things I’m most looking forward to this year is that next month I will be heading for Fishguard  to teach  the Advanced Romance Writing Course  on the Writers’ and Artists’ Workshop Weekend. The course is sold out and I will meet up with the students who all want to be published authors. Some I’ve seen before, some are new names to me.  But I can tell which ones have the best chance of succeeding -   that and which ones don’t.  The ones who have that  vital ‘resolution’  will keep on trying, keep on writing.    The course I teach will, I hope, help and inspire them – but it can’t guarantee success.  I can’t claim that anything can. The one thing I am sure of is that without  resolution,  without the determination to pick yourself up one time more than you’ve been knocked down, the one thing you’ll guarantee yourself Is failure.

Resolution will keep them in the saddle, hopefully on the road towards that success they want – however they personally define  success. But they don’t need a whole ‘new you’ to do that.

So that’s my resolution for this new year -  in a single word – resolution.

What about you? What's your word for 2013?

Kate’s new title – A Throne For The Taking  - will be out in Mills & Boon Modern and Harlequin Presents in June 2013. In the meantime,  several of her older titles have been reissued in the M&B Vintage  or  Harlequin  Treasury as ebooks.

For the most up to date news and details  visit her web site  or her blog.