I feel like quitting.

Okay, I know that sounds defeatist. Perhaps it is the time of the year. I do not like December. It is usually hot. There is Christmas - something which stopped being any fun about the year I turned four - and my birthday which is close enough to Christmas that nobody really notices it. (That's fine with me. I don't like birthdays for me either. I have reached a point where it is just inutterably depressing to get older.)

My third Christmas was fine. I was given a wonderful little Hornby train set. My father and I spent the morning playing with it under the dining room table at my grandparent's house. I read the instructions to him and he set it up...there were not too many instructions but I did manage it myself. Christmas went downhill after that. There was always a problem because my maternal grandmother wanted us to spend the entire day with her. We wanted to spend it with my paternal grandparents who, although strict, were the sort of people with whom you could always feel secure. They were happily married. My maternal grandparents were not. Christmas feels more like maternal grandparents than my paternal grandparents. I am not happily married to it. Indeed, I feel entirely anti-social about it and all the fuss.

In a week I will have been writing the blog for a year. In the process I have found some other blogs and virtually met some people (and actually met one person). It has been interesting. If I can keep it up then I will have achieved my goal of writing it for a year. My other writing is a mess. It usually is. I am not a disciplined writer. I cannot start at the beginning of a book and work my way through to the end. It just does not happen like that. I know there are writers who decide exactly what is going to happen and exactly what their characters are going to be like. Mine tell me. I might argue with them - but that's another story.

I am not sure what else I have achieved - and yet I have been busy all the year. It feels as if the year has only just started not as if it is ending. I looked at some other blogs this morning. You have all read more than me - and I thought I had read a lot. Those who knit have knitted more than me - and I thought I had done quite a lot for me. Writing? Well, that has been up and down for all of us. It is the writing which is the problem. It is not simple. Nicola Morgan is wrong to suggest that there is a very simple theory to getting published. I followed all the rules and I can't even get a rejection slip. I can't even get a darn response. I feel like quitting.
....but I promised Ms Whirlwind she would have the sequel of the sequel for Christmas.