Atop my desk, where I see it everyday, there’s a picture of a woman pirouetting above a frozen lake.

Underneath it, it says “If you must walk on thin ice, you might as well learn to dance.”

I’ve been doing a lot of looking back into my writing career — and the recent past anyway. This is a side effect of my spending a lot of time cleaning around here and finally not just putting things away that should have been done five years ago, but also getting rid of a lot of things that have accrued over the last five years because the house wasn’t organized, so we keep buying duplicates. And triplicates.

This means looking at a lot of the stuff that I’ve accumulated and sometimes at weird and surprising glimpses into my past and my career.

Other things have played into it, of course. Including my mom’s death, which inevitably has stirred up memories and thoughts of paths not taken.

Overall, as far as I can determine, the only thing that has held me back in all of my writing career is fear.

Oh, don’t get me wrong: there were people who did things. Mistakes were made, both mine and others.

BUT overall, the worst of it has been the fear: fear of writing what I really wanted to write; fear of writing what I was writing in the way it needed to be written. And also, fear of demanding what I knew the book needed. Fear of speaking frankly to… well, everyone.

Fear.

It not only hurt my career, but it made me… less.

To an extent it was responsible for how ill I got. But beyond that, because when you write, you are writing with all you are, it made me less capable of writing what I should have written, how it should be written.

It made me less, far less, than I could be.

Was it stupid fear? No. I was terrified that any book could be my last. You see, it wasn’t under my control at all. In some ways it wasn’t under anyone’s control.

It has been said that even trad pub doesn’t know how to sell books. If they did, they wouldn’t do so many of the strange things they do. But a lot of the influence in a book selling has to do with… well, cover. If people even have heard of it (It has amazed me that No man’s Land sells copies every time I mention it somewhere major, despite (I think) all the saturation publicity I’ve done. (Though not classic publicity because I haven’t figured that out yet.)

NONE of that had anything to do with me. The only thing I could do was write the best book possible, but that only mattered once the book was in someone’s hands. So– until then– I was powerless.

So being afraid was rational.

My career would end up at any minute, through no fault of my own. And because of this, being a rational woman, I was afraid. I had a lot of investment, more every year, which — yet — couldn’t guarantee any kind of success.

And yet, as bad as the situation was; as much as I was right to be scared, the fear itself hurt me and my career.

Now? Now there are options. Now you can be in charge of your career. Sure, I’m still discovering this world and all the new possibilities. And likely you are too.

So, on this New Year’s Eve, as we venture forth into an unexplored and unwritten future, as much as none of us knows what comes next, and it’s all very scary, BE NOT AFRAID.

I wish you a fearless 2026