Good news washes the bad away

I had some good news this week.

Get lucky?

It’s the sort of good news that comes with contracts, so forgive my intentional vagueness. Until the ink is dry, it would not only be unprofessional to furnish details, but more critically would be jinxing myself something fierce.

But the news contrasts nicely with several weeks worth of…not bad news, exactly, but disappointing news. Setbacks. Annoyance. A few rolls of the dice in my writing life went against me. Nothing serious or even particularly significant in the long term, but they fell in quick enough succession to bring me down a little.

It took the unexpected arrival of the good news for me to recognise that I was in that slump I mentioned yesterday.

The good news did me a solid. The good news punched well above its weight class. The good news got me back in the game again.

It’s not precisely the case that I need validation to keep going – my brain never stops making up stories for very long, so eventually I write them down just to make them go away. But if it’s been a while between ego boosts – a thumbs up, a sincere “I liked that thing you wrote”, the acknowledgment of peers – I tend to forget just how much they can lift me.

So yeah, a bout of good luck is never unwelcome. (Neither is a thumbs up, just quietly). And it’s timely to remind myself of that thing that golfer said that time: “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”

Ahem. Getting to work now.

(And yes, when I can say something official, I will come back with a less hazy declaration)