Goodbye, Blue Monday

So we’re approaching the end of January and now that Blue Monday is safely behind us, I feel it’s a good time to sit back and take stock of the year to come. 

Blue Monday always strikes me as a commercial construction designed to make us all feel miserable so we spend to cheer ourselves up but, looking past that particular element, I always find it a good point to start the year. The frenetic pace of the festive period has slowed, the flurry of atypical activity surrounding resolutions has died down and we’re back to whatever passes for normal. 

This year we have a new garden. We’ve been in since late summer, watching everything die down. In the winter it was time to clear the flower and vegetable beds (yes, for the first time I have a vegetable garden) and watch what’s coming up and who’s coming in. 

The visitors are birds by the hundred, a bold red squirrel and a fox that creeps in by night leaving grim surprises on the lawn. (A pheasant with its throat ripped out, since you ask.) And so far the bleak winter garden in offering us snowdrops, promising daffodils in Wordsworthian abundance and delivering a single aconite as a golden down payment. 

Spring is definitely on its way and maybe that’s why I feel so optimistic about life in general and my writing in particular. A writer is programmed to feel disappointment. Most of us have dozens of rejections to show before that first acceptance came, and just because your first short story is published (say) it doesn’t stop the next ten bouncing back. And every author knows a single-star review weighs many times more that a five-star one. 

At times it’s hard to be positive. When November ladles rain over the garden and the birds sit shivering in the bare trees; when it’s mid-January ad nothing is up in the garden; these are times when there’s a miasma over life in general. Those are the days when your beta readers hate your new manuscript and you want to cry; when the one-star reviews come more thickly (maybe the readers are down at heart, too); and when it’s easy to decide it’s not worth going on.

But the grey days are behind us and the sunshine is getting noticeably warmer. So far 2020 has had both ups and downs and I’m sure that’ll go on. But there are books to be written and stories to be told. I can’t help feeling generally optimistic. 

Let’s see what the year brings.