This year had a lot of ups and downs for me.

This past spring, I felt about as low as I have felt about my writing since I started. My book was going nowhere. There seemed to be nothing I could do to better its chances of being sold. I was unsure if anything I was writing was any good.

Then something happened. And that something was nothing at all.

There's a story Stephen King tells about his first novel, "Carrie," my more frightening namesake. The novel, to hear him tell it, was in the wastebasket. (This was in the days when documents were made of real paper and went into actual wastebaskets.) His wife, Tabitha, pulled the pages out, brushed off the cigarette ashes, and read them. She thought they were good. She encouraged him to continue. He did, and the rest is history.

I love this story because nothing happened. Tabitha believed in him. He decided not to quit. This is not the stuff of a screenplay -- certainly nothing as exciting as Stephen King would write. But I love the story because I believe this is how most of the big miracles happen. In my case, I just moped around for a few days and finally realized that, if I was going to feel any different, I would have to do something different. And so I did.

I started planning a show for the first time in four years. I made plans to perform in front of people -- not because it was the most practical course of action for a writer to take, but because it made me happy, and it connected me and my writing to other people. For the first time, I almost forgot I had a book being shopped around. As soon as I started making plans, everything changed.

I realized I loved the new book I was working on and dove into revisions. I was able to finish the book after that. I had been worried I would have less energy to devote to projects if I picked up another one. Instead, I had much more energy than before. I had just been a little stuck.

And, somewhere in the middle of all that, my book sold.

In a movie, there would have been a miraculous phone call that turned everything around.

"Hello, Carrie? We're interested in buying your book!" the caller would have said in the movie version of my life. This is not what happened. I was already unstuck when the good news arrived.

This is the lesson I'd like to take into the new year.

It's easy to get a little stuck. There are things that will genuinely slow me down and hamper my success and, as optimistic as I am, I'm not blind to these obstacles. More will come in the future. I know this.

But, somehow, I need to find a way to get unstuck.

Sometimes it's as simple as messing with my routine: Go out for a coffee once in a while, take a walk in the morning, call a friend I haven't talked to in a while. It doesn't really matter. That is the point. It doesn't matter what I do, as long as I get unstuck. The hardest thing is to recognize that I am stuck and realize I don't have to be.

I can't fix everything at once. I might spin my wheels for a while. But, with any luck, someone like Tabitha will give my rear bumper a push when I need it, and I can get myself moving again.

Happy New Year,

Carrie

Photos and other things can be found on Facebook at CarrieClassonAuthor.

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"It's not what you eat between Christmas and New Year's that counts, it's what you eat between New Year's and Christmas."

I've had this mantra in my head because my husband, Peter, and I have been trying to keep our weight in check. Peter is doing it for sensible reasons. His cholesterol and blood pressure have been high. He worries he might be at risk for a stroke. Peter was a skinny kid, a skinny teenager and a skinny adult. Discovering in his 60s that he was, in fact, capable of gaining weight came as a great surprise -- and disappointment.

In response, Peter has been terrifically disciplined and has avoided sweets for more than two months. He has gotten a lot slimmer. I have gotten slimmer, too. But I have no sensible protocol. I just skip meals. I have low cholesterol and low blood pressure, but it really irks me when my clothes don't fit, and I found a lot of them didn't. So Peter and I both went on our individual versions of a diet.

Peter's sensible portion control method is very slow and reliable. My method of "just don't eat until I'm ready to fall over" is probably not as medically sound, but also works. We both lost a bit of weight, and we both feel better -- Peter because of his blood pressure, me because of my vanity.

Peter and I share the same scale. He weighs himself first and, when I get up a bit later, I weigh myself. Sometimes we compare notes. Sometimes we commiserate. Just as I am waking, I hear Peter utter a sigh of semi-satisfaction, or mutter something dark about the fickleness of numbers, and I'll know if he had a good or bad day with our mutual acquaintance, the scale.

But now is the season that everyone frets about, and there are going to be days when eating too much is pretty much inevitable.

"Oh, no," I announced to Peter one morning after a particularly decadent dinner. "I don't think I want to see the scale today!"

Peter replied, "Even the scale deserves a day off."

We both glanced at our little digital nemesis with a mixture of emotions, none of them good. I thought leaving the poor thing alone sounded like wise advice. I like to think I took pity on the scale. It can't be a very fun job having one grumpy person after another standing on you and grumbling -- as if the perfectly accurate information you are relaying is somehow your fault.

And sometimes, a little denial can go a long way. I have found that my weight fluctuates wildly from one day to the next. I started weighing myself in kilograms for a while, just because the numbers represented larger chunks of weight. I couldn't get worked up about a pound or two, but after a couple of kilograms, I thought it made sense to take notice.

In the U.K., many folks still use stones as a measurement of weight and, while I'm not a fan of getting too much information, this seems like taking it a little too far. A stone is equal to 14 pounds. Ignoring the situation until I had added on the equivalent of a retaining wall seems like more deliberate denial than even I could manage.

But it is the season for big meals and cheese and crackers and cookies and rice pudding, and I honestly can't see myself missing any of it. I know Peter will keep being disciplined and avoiding sweets.

I'm thinking avoiding the scale sounds easier.

Till next time,

Carrie

Photos and other things can be found on Facebook at CarrieClassonAuthor.

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I will be home in time for Christmas.

It's always a little hard to leave Mexico, and leaving right before the holidays is perhaps the hardest. The giant Christmas tree just went up in front of the church last night. Thousands of handmade tin stars hang over the streets, embedded with colored glass beads and lit from within. The poinsettias (or "nochebuenas") decorate the windowsills. There is a concert every night of the week. It is hard to leave, in the middle of all this celebration, to return to our own Christmas up north, where the weather is so very different.

But I don't really mind because I'll be home, just in time for Christmas.

There's a reason there are so many songs about going home for Christmas. Many of them are from decades past, in the heyday of movie musicals. I imagine it must have been a challenge for songwriters, sitting around a swimming pool in Los Angeles, penning lyrics about snow falling and sleigh bells ringing and Christmas trees.

One of my favorite holiday songs is about Christmas in Australia, where going home for Christmas means arriving at the hottest time of year, with family sitting outside drinking "white wine in the sun." People write about being especially determined to get home at Christmas and especially lonely if they don't make it home.

I know there are plenty of people who don't go anywhere at Christmas and have given up the whole idea of what the holiday season is supposed to look like in favor of a more relaxed and peaceful time, with fewer expectations and obligations. I can understand that as well.

But I'll be home in time for Christmas.

I am fortunate because I actually enjoy all the holiday cliches. I love baking cookies every year with my sister and wrapping packages and setting the table for more people than it can comfortably hold. I love the falling snow and the ringing of sleigh bells and -- most of all -- the Christmas trees.

My first official act of the Christmas season will be to hurry down to the local hardware store to get my Christmas tree from the lot out front. I will walk there with my cart, and I will worry all the way to the store that I am too late. I will imagine the tree lot empty except for a few broken branches lying in the trampled snow.

"Sorry! Just sold our last tree 30 minutes ago," the man in the insulated overalls will tell me, and I will stand there in the snow with my little cart and my bungee cords and wonder where I will find a Christmas tree at this late date.

But this will not happen.

Instead, I will pick out a tree, all wrapped up in twine, and I won't even untie it. I will judge by its appearance -- all tied up -- that it will be the perfect tree.

The man in the lot will help me strap it into my cart, and I'll wheel it home. A few people will stare at the woman hauling her tree in a cart, but I won't mind. And when I get home, I'll put my tree in the stand and cut the twine cords binding it, and ever so slowly, the cold tree will unfurl. In the morning, I'll get out of bed, and it will be as if a miracle has taken place in my living room.

The perfect Christmas tree will be there, waiting for me, and I'll be home -- just in time for Christmas.

Till next time,

Carrie

Photos and other things can be found on Facebook at CarrieClassonAuthor.

DISTRIBUTED BY ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION