Merry Christmas, Wordplayers! – Helping Writers Become Authors

Dear Wordplayers!

This week, I am wishing you a merry Christmas and a beautiful holiday season. My hope is that as you look back on this year, you find it rich in blessings, memories, good surprises, growth opportunities, and wonderful stories of every kind.

As always, this time of year is a retrospective for me. What did I accomplish? What did I learn? Did my plans turn out how I thought they would? Better? Worse?

This year, most of my answers to these questions are “a little of both.” This was the year I started writing fiction again after a nearly four-year dry spell. It was also a year in which I struggled nearly every day with my frustration over unresolved living circumstances. It was a year in which I healed and grew in ways so profound they knock my socks off every time I compare myself at the end of 2022 with how I was at the end of 2021. And yet it was also a year in which I often felt like I was “stuck” and “doing nothing.”

For many of us, I think, this was a different sort of year. In much of the world (although certainly not all), what it offered was different from the flat-out chaos and uncertainty of the previous few years. Life seems to have settled down for a moment, like we’re catching our breath, but also like we’re now having to try to figure out how to “be” again.

What I’m learning is that “being” is both the easiest and the hardest work in the world—but that perhaps, in its own quiet way, it is the most important work. As we round the corner of the solstice (“back to the sun!” as I like to think of it here in the Northern Hemisphere) and hopefully enter the holidays in these coming weeks with hearts full of love and gratitude, my words for you are simply: Thanks for being.

Thanks for being you.

Thanks for being here.

Thanks for listening.

Thanks for talking.

Thanks for writing the words and telling the stories that make our world go ’round.

May your new year turn the page into a chapter full of your best stories yet—both on the page and in your lives. I look forward to continuing the journey with you into 2023.

Merry Christmas!