{"id":1322,"date":"2007-12-31T19:17:30","date_gmt":"2008-01-01T00:17:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=1322"},"modified":"2007-12-31T19:17:30","modified_gmt":"2008-01-01T00:17:30","slug":"the-year-of-the-surrender","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=1322","title":{"rendered":"The Year of the Surrender"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just so you won\u2019t have to enter the new year sick with worry<\/strong> over how the Walker Christmas gathering went, I\u2019ll 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\u2019t heavy enough to interfere with travel. (I probably shouldn\u2019t 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.)<\/p>\n

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\u2019m more or less centrally located, so that the brother in Iowa doesn\u2019t have to drive up to the North Woods, and the brother from the North Woods\u2026 well, you follow the logic. The drawback is that once we\u2019re all in the house there isn\u2019t 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\u2019s girlfriend, by sucking our stomachs in. I can only assume it\u2019s serious, if he was willing to put her through such an ordeal.<\/p>\n

We took the cowards\u2019 way out with food, and ate Kentucky Fried Chicken, with heavy side orders of chocolates and pies and cookies.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll tell you about my favorite Christmas gift in a later post. I want to share pictures, and I have other plans for just now.<\/p>\n

Some people think of the New Year\u2019s season<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t talked about this, at least directly, in this space before, but I\u2019ll do it now, because it seems time.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve had a strategy for my life from the time I was a boy. It was a fairly simple strategy\u2014one that made sense to me, considering the circumstances of who I am and what I wanted to do.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not what you\u2019d call a fighter. Faced with human opposition, I generally fold my hand and walk away. But in matters of living, where it\u2019s just me against Life, I\u2019m pretty stubborn. I take my lumps and continue doing what I was doing before. It\u2019s actually a lot like that classic definition of insanity\u2014doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. So it\u2019s taken me 57 years to realize that my Grand Strategy isn\u2019t a winner.<\/p>\n

Losing my publisher didn\u2019t convince me. Even my agent going out of business didn\u2019t quite do it. (It\u2019s 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\u2019m perfectly willing to write. It\u2019s the being an author thing\u2014the business and relationships and self-promotion\u2014that kill me.)<\/p>\n

Anyway, there\u2019s serious talk at the seminary where I\u2019m librarian. The Board is going to ask me to get my Master\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

But it also means I can\u2019t go to an agent and promise him that I\u2019ll be turning out fiction in a steady manner. There just won\u2019t be time for that.<\/p>\n

So for now, I officially declare myself a former novelist.<\/p>\n

This may change. It should only take two or three years to get the degree, and then I\u2019ll have time to write books again. And maybe God will open the door.<\/p>\n

But right now, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

I guess that\u2019s my New Year\u2019s Resolution.<\/p>\n

Have a blessed new year.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just so you won\u2019t have to enter the new year sick with worry over how the Walker Christmas gathering went, I\u2019ll 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, … Continue reading The Year of the Surrender<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1322\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}