Dear Wordplayers!
This week, I am wishing you a merry Christmas and a beautiful holiday season. My hope is that as you look back on this year, you find it rich in blessings, memories, good surprises, growth opportunities, and wonderful stories of every kind.

A cold and snowy Nebraska sunrise.
As always, this time of year is a retrospective for me. What did I accomplish? What did I learn? Did my plans turn out how I thought they would? Better? Worse?
This year, most of my answers to these questions are “a little of both.” This was the year I started writing fiction again after a nearly four-year dry spell. It was also a year in which I struggled nearly every day with my frustration over unresolved living circumstances. It was a year in which I healed and grew in ways so profound they knock my socks off every time I compare myself at the end of 2022 with how I was at the end of 2021. And yet it was also a year in which I often felt like I was “stuck” and “doing nothing.”
For many of us, I think, this was a different sort of year. In much of the world (although certainly not all), what it offered was different from the flat-out chaos and uncertainty of the previous few years. Life seems to have settled down for a moment, like we’re catching our breath, but also like we’re now having to try to figure out how to “be” again.
What I’m learning is that “being” is both the easiest and the hardest work in the world—but that perhaps, in its own quiet way, it is the most important work. As we round the corner of the solstice (“back to the sun!” as I like to think of it here in the Northern Hemisphere) and hopefully enter the holidays in these coming weeks with hearts full of love and gratitude, my words for you are simply: Thanks for being.
Thanks for being you.
Thanks for being here.
Thanks for listening.
Thanks for talking.
Thanks for writing the words and telling the stories that make our world go ’round.
May your new year turn the page into a chapter full of your best stories yet—both on the page and in your lives. I look forward to continuing the journey with you into 2023.
Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. I look forward to reading more of your marvelous tips in 2023.
Merry Christmas Kim. May all your dreams for 2023 come true.
Merry Christmas KM and the same to wordplayers everywhere!
Merry Christmas Katie. I look forward to another year of kind and thoughtful words from you.
Thank you, Katie. Merry Christmas to you, too! And a heck of a Happy New Year!
Merry Christmas to you. May 2023 be a better year for all of us.
Merry Christmas. I hope 2023 is the best year ever.
Merry Christmas, and thank you for helping writer become authors 3>
Merry Christmas, KM!
Merry Christmas, Katie! We hope you have a good one!
I’m so glad to hear you’re writing more fiction. Can you give us a preview of what it will be about?
Merry Christmas to you Katie! And thank you too, for all your valuable advice and insights 🙂
Merry Christmas, I just bought the Outlining workbook yesterday to go with the book I already got last year. What an amazing program, full of questions and steps as shown in the book. I love the fact that there are notes that have info on what pages in the book correspond with the section in the workbook. I highly recommend both the book and the program, they will help make your writing journey a bit easier.
Thanks for the awesome books and apps.
Merry Christmas right back!