After a crazy year of ups and downs, I have settled on 5 things that I accomplished or learned this year that I think will make me a better writer in 2010:

1. I started walking again after an accident left me wheelchair bound in June, 2008. You have no idea how important mobility is to creativity when you're a jittery type of person who has to be in motion. Although writing requires sitting, when all you can do is sit, the computer eventually starts to seem like the enemy.

2. My book, Gumbo Justice, was published by Oak Tree Press. This was the biggest event in my year. I went to my first writer's conference, the PSWA conference in Las Vegas, where my publisher brought my book to me for the first time. Seeing your book in print for the first time is more than just motivation to keep writing, but also validation for the piece of your life you give up in order to write.

3. I have learned to accept things I can not control and either do my best to work around them, or ignore them. The publishing of my novel was pushed back a year because of my wreck. Hurricane Katrina also affected getting the book in print. An agent was looking at the novel when the hurricane hit and we were evacuated. We came home to a host of other problems, fixing our damaged house, getting our kids back in school and such, and by the time I was ready to deal with the agent, she had decided not to take on new writers. It was heartbreaking, and wasn't until my book actually did come out that I realized I shouldn't have been so bothered at the time. I couldn't change the agent deciding not to take it any more than I could change Katrina changing the focus of our lives.

4. I have learned not to regard so-so or bad reviews as a negative thing. A reviewer commented on my work in a somewhat unflattering way, and my first instinct is to criticize the reviewer. But then I decided my time would be better spent drawing something positive from the experience and really searching my soul and my work to determine if there was an element of truth in the comments that were given. And honestly, I can say there was. Although no one else may have seen my work in the same way as that reviewer, when I looked hard at it, I could see how the reviewer may have come up with the criticism, and will work to try not to repeat the negative in the next book, regardless of whether anyone else saw it or not. The point is to try to make each work the best it can possibly be, and if someone finds a flaw, I would like to correct it next time.

5. I learned a lot about online promotion, which is difficult for me because I hate to try to sell myself. It's the same with selling books in person. I feel uncomfortable with the "Here I am, come buy my book," approach. But since putting yourself out there is the only way to get book sales with a small press, (or even most large houses nowadays), I'm glad I learned what I did, and will hopefully continue to learn and make promotion opportunities for myself.