What I have learned

I have learned things this year and sometimes I think that I am not yet ready to gather this small lessons, but if I delay it any longer I will forget. Mostly I have learned to stand by yourself. Stay fast by what you have written. I have found that there will be more people who like you when you have been deemed successful by some other party. There will be new friends. What I know now is that some of these new friends will be like yourself, dealing with the same things, finding their feet in a new world. Reach out to them because they are lost as you are lost and there is comfort in their company. But stand firm beside the ones who were with you before success. They are the ones who will last. They are forever, or at least for a longish time. This is just a beginning. I will think on it. There will be more to come.

Quiet end to the year

Everything is different. 2009 as trickling through our fingers and I look back on it and it was a year. It was the year. It was a year when I realised that success has its own problems. The insecurity that comes from high expectations, the inability to write because suddenly it seems I have a reputation to live up to. And all the joys. Not fucking up on book tour (except the toilet paper that one time but we won't get into that). The post card from Helen Garner. That surely was the best night. The wonderful quiet joy of recognition by someone I admire. This is the end of a year and it seems that everything has changed. It seems that I have grown older and wiser and calmer.

I thank my friends for this. The ones that have claimed my sucesses as their own. My solid army of supporters, and amongst them the few that I call my family.

Now 2010. Time perhaps for some new year resolutions. The next book / books and a commitment to keep myself honest. I promise to use this venue to keep track of my progress. It worked for the last book. Let it work for this. A return to the furious vagina.

More research. More reading. More good books beside my bed, less job-books as I consider myself more a writer than a bookseller. A month of solid work in Januar. Less chat, more words. The internet will be my friend and not a mere distraction.

2010. Lets look forward to 2010.