Just so you won’t have to enter the new year sick with worry over how the Walker Christmas gathering went, I’ll note here that it went just fine. The weather was utterly perfect, in accordance with the demands of the genre. You know how Christmas looks in those Hallmark Theater TV specials? All the deep, snow-covered scenery, with big, fat flakes falling? It was just like that on Saturday. But the snow wasn’t heavy enough to interfere with travel. (I probably shouldn’t have described it to the Youngest Niece, when she called from China. I think she was homesick enough without having to listen to a description of Postcard Christmas Weather.)

The great advantage of having the family gather at my place for holidays (aside from the motivation it gives me to dust once a year) is that I’m more or less centrally located, so that the brother in Iowa doesn’t have to drive up to the North Woods, and the brother from the North Woods… well, you follow the logic. The drawback is that once we’re all in the house there isn’t actually any room to move around, so we all have to stand in one place for the entire length of the visit, employing an elaborate choreography to allow us to visit the bathroom in rotation. However, we overcame that difficulty, even making room for the Oldest Nephew’s girlfriend, by sucking our stomachs in. I can only assume it’s serious, if he was willing to put her through such an ordeal.

We took the cowards’ way out with food, and ate Kentucky Fried Chicken, with heavy side orders of chocolates and pies and cookies.

I’ll tell you about my favorite Christmas gift in a later post. I want to share pictures, and I have other plans for just now.

Some people think of the New Year’s season as a time to look forward and make resolutions. I prefer to make it a time for looking back, for evaluating the events of the past twelve months and beating myself over the head about every mistake, real or imagined.

2007 was a big year in my history. I will always remember it, I suspect, as the Year of the Surrender. This was the year I admitted defeat. I haven’t talked about this, at least directly, in this space before, but I’ll do it now, because it seems time.

I’ve had a strategy for my life from the time I was a boy. It was a fairly simple strategy—one that made sense to me, considering the circumstances of who I am and what I wanted to do.

This first step was to get published and be a famous novelist. This, I assumed, would provide me the validation I needed to get some woman to marry me.

I’m not what you’d call a fighter. Faced with human opposition, I generally fold my hand and walk away. But in matters of living, where it’s just me against Life, I’m pretty stubborn. I take my lumps and continue doing what I was doing before. It’s actually a lot like that classic definition of insanity—doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. So it’s taken me 57 years to realize that my Grand Strategy isn’t a winner.

Losing my publisher didn’t convince me. Even my agent going out of business didn’t quite do it. (It’s often said among writers that everybody wants to be an author, but nobody wants to actually write. The irony of my position is that I’m perfectly willing to write. It’s the being an author thing—the business and relationships and self-promotion—that kill me.)

Anyway, there’s serious talk at the seminary where I’m librarian. The Board is going to ask me to get my Master’s in Library Science, online. This will be very useful for their institutional plans, and also ought to make me better able to competently do my job, which any honest employee wants to do.

But it also means I can’t go to an agent and promise him that I’ll be turning out fiction in a steady manner. There just won’t be time for that.

So for now, I officially declare myself a former novelist.

This may change. It should only take two or three years to get the degree, and then I’ll have time to write books again. And maybe God will open the door.

But right now, it’s the time in my life (it comes to everyone, I think) when I have to bow to God, and lay down my own plans, and embrace His.

I guess that’s my New Year’s Resolution.

Have a blessed new year.