Jenny: 2012, The Year of Impossible Things!

I just got off the phone with my eighty-three year old grandmother. My Grandma Joy has traveled the world and taught an army of children and welcomed an untold number of strangers to her table. She’s nothing less than pure sunshine—an unfailing radiance and warmth—to just about everyone who knows her.

Just talking to her makes you brave, makes you believe in impossible things.

And O Writer of Words, you need that, don’t you? You need the courage to believe you can keep writing through fear and loneliness, through disquiet and uncertainty, through success and trial. When your query is rejected, when your book isn’t working, when the creative well runs murky or just plain dry, it may feel as though you’re lost in the thicket, a gloomy tangle where the future looks at best inscrutable, and at worst, like darkness looming.

Friends and family can support, mentors can counsel, but in the end, you are the only one who can fight your way through the muck and snarl. You are the only one who can pull yourself out of harm’s way. Day by day, page by page, you must be the one to dare the impossible, emerging as the hero of your own story.

Let this be the year. Your year.

When your book earns rejection, again and again, do the impossible. Keep writing.

When your agent quits the business, leaving you back at square one, do the impossible. Keep writing.

When your contract falls through and all other doors seem to close, do the impossible. Keep writing.

When your first (or fiftieth!) book fails to earn out and the critics call for your blood, do the impossible. Keep writing.

When your inbox spells doom and your own words mock from the page, dare to do the impossible thing, the only gambit that can rescue tomorrow. Keep writing. Keep writing. Keep writing.

And make 2012 the year of impossible things.