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New Year’s Day is very arbitrary, don’t you think?

Raise your hand if you’ve watched Good Will Hunting. You know that part, where Will’s in the bar and Skylar says maybe they can go get coffee sometime? And he says, “Sure. Or maybe we can sit around and eat caramels.” She gives him an odd look and he says, “If you think about it, eating caramels is about as arbitrary as drinking coffee.”

That’s what I think about New Year’s Day. After all, it’s just a day. Why not make resolutions on July 16th? Why do we think we can up and change our lives because the year ticks forward? Let’s all just admit it right up front. New Year’s Day is sort of weird.

With that said, I will embrace this holiday in all its weirdness.

Tamika, a writing/blogging friend of mine, wrote a post about the New Year and themes. She gave her 2010 a theme. I thought, “What a good idea!”

Zooming in on 2009:
My theme: Growth

I grew a lot. As a writer. And as a Christian.

Looking forward to 2010:
My theme: Victory

HA! Wouldn’t that be nice? It’s sort of hard to predict. I’m not sure what my theme will be. I’ll have to get back to you on that in 2011.

For now…

My 2009 Highlights
My son turned one. Learned to walk (and quickly run). Hubby and I celebrated our 5-year anniversary. I went to my first writing conference. Landed my dream agent, Rachelle Gardner. And now my 3rd book is out on submission, currently with the editorial team of a large publishing house.

My Writing Hopes for 2010:
– Revise and edit Wishing on Willows until it sparkles like Edward Cullen in the sun.
– Finish the third book in my series, Sunsets in Heaven
– Think positive and dream big (like, get a book contract!)

Life resolutions:
– Be an encourager to my husband
– Spend less time talking at God and more time listening to Him
– Be present in each moment

Random Thoughts by Katie Ganshert (in tribute to Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy):
What do we call this new decade? Come to think of it, what do we call the last decade? I was born in the eighties. Spent my childhood and teenage years in the nineties. Grew up in the…what? Ones? And what’s next? Became a very wise, responsible, mature adult in the…teens? Is that what we’ll call them? Seriously… help me out here.

Questions to Ponder: What were your 2009 highlights? If you had to pick a theme for last year, what would it be?removetweetmeme

I’m reading through my rough draft of Wishing on Willows. Makes my stomach knot up like a tangled string of Christmas lights. I keep forcing myself to take deep, calming breaths. I keep reminding myself that this is how I always feel when I read through a first draft. My reminders do very little. Panic has its way. It perches inside my chest and heaves like a raving lunatic. Can you really fix this? Is this story even redeemable?

The problems so far? There are four that seem glaring at this point.

– Pacing feels all wrong. Too quick. Almost frantic. I can’t settle into one character long enough to get to know him or her.

– Motivations are not strong. Robin wants to save her cafe. Braxton wants to buy it. But who cares? I’d be shocked if the reader did at this point.

– Where’s my voice? Did it curl up and hibernate these past four months?

– Characterization. My characters feel flat. 2-dimensional, cardboard cutouts of the people I know them to be in my mind.

I’m not even focusing on the microedits right now. I’m ignoring all the passive tense. All the telling. All the cliches and redundant phrasing. Those are easy to fix. Those are fun to fix.

These larger problems. They frighten me. Make me want to tuck my tail between my legs and cower underneath a table. Ah, but that won’t get me anywhere, will it? I suppose I should remind myself that this is the writing journey. Writing the rough draft is the easy part. My only job then was to show up. To sit in front of the computer and follow my outline. To get words on the page. Now comes the hard work. The stuff that makes me squirm and sweat and doubt and pace and crack my knuckles five hundred times a minute.

The only remedy? Roll up my sleeves and get to work.

Questions to Ponder: What’s the hardest part of writing for you? Do revisions scare you as much as they scare me?removetweetmeme

This Christmas didn’t feel much like Christmas. Mainly because the week leading up to it, hubby got sick, then I got sick. It was like 96 hours of delirium. Then, just when we thought we were all in the clear, hubby got slammed again. On Christmas Eve. A constant deluge of throw up (ew). We were supposed to drive to Wisconsin. Well, that wasn’t going to happen. So while hubby camped out in the bathroom, I took Brogan to Christmas Eve service all by myself. In the rain. Oh yeah. Did I mention that it rained ALL day long on Christmas Eve? A constant down pour. It felt sort of weird. Being at church without Ryan. Knowing we were supposed to be in Wisconsin. Having to use an umbrella on December 24th.

I had all these expectations for Christmas this year. I thought I’d go shopping the week before. I thought I’d have fun picking out cool presents. But I was too sick or taking care of somebody who was sick to give much attention to gifts. Then I thought we’d have a fun time driving to Wisconsin and celebrating with Ryan’s family. That didn’t happen either. We ended up driving up Christmas morning. Ryan slept in the back of the van with Bubba while my windshield wipers squeaked against the windshield the entire two and a half hours (yes, it rained all day on Christmas too). I thought it would be cozy and white, not rainy and gray. I thought I’d feel very tuned into Jesus and the miracle of His birth, but I was flat-out distracted.

Needless to say, my expectations weren’t met.

I had to ask myself, after moping around the house: Katie, how are you handling the unexpected?

Because, really, that’s what life is, isn’t it? Unexpected.

We have an image or an idea in our head about how something is going to be. How something will play out. Expectations chase us wherever we go. We have them for nearly everything. Marriage. Relationships. Jobs. Parenthood. Writing. Health. Faith. The new year. The future.

Sometimes, or maybe a lot of times, our expectations go unmet. For whatever reason, what we imagined and what ends up happening just don’t fit together. Something unexpected happens and throws everything off course.

That’s just life.

We can’t control it. We can only control how we respond to it. And we usually have two choices. We can choose to mope around the house because things aren’t going how we expected. Or we can choose to embrace the unexpected. To embrace it in all its messy glory. To embrace it because we only get one life to live, and time’s too short and valuable to waste on pouting.

Question to Ponder: How do you handle the unexpected?removetweetmeme