It’s a new year, and I’m hoping 2012 will be a year of good things to come. With that in mind, I settled down today to retackle my work-in-progress, and I’ve got to say, I was actually excited to read it. With my last rendition, which I am more or less completely rewriting, I was bored to tears. I didn’t care what happened. I wasn’t excited to follow the storyline. But with the current draft, I wanted to know what would happen, which is saying something since I wrote it and should know what happens.

In the past, I’ve berated myself for not having a published manuscript, for not yet achieving my lifelong goal of publishing a novel. Please insert laughter and snide remarks here, since by lifelong I really mean my dream of 28.5 years, assuming this dream started when I was an infant. When I’ve read about the unpublished novels published writers have tucked away in drawers, I always said that wouldn’t be me. But I currently have 2 more or less completed novels that will probably never see the inside of a publishing house. But out of those experiences, I am learning how to be a better writer, how to create engaging content and engaging characters. My failures are not actually failures. They are just test runs.

My fiance’s brother works for a video game company, and when he got the job, his father made a joke about how all of the hours he spent playing video games, he was actually interning for his current job. I’d like to think that my unpublishable books have all been part of an internship. And hopefully those efforts will pay off with the final prize, the right to legitimately call myself a writer.