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oday is my turn again to host in the Giftmas Blog Tour, and I’m happy to introduce you to author Jay Wilburn. Please don’t forget to enter the contest for free books and stuff! You’ll find the entry below the post. Catch the whole tour here. Thanks, and Happy New Year!
Making Something of New Year
by Jay Wilburn
I always felt a little darker around the New Year than I did around Christmas. I think it had a lot to do with being a teacher for so many years. The dread of knowing I was going to be dusting myself off and getting back to work was hanging over me on the first of the month.
I tried a lot of different things. I tried to take down Christmas decorations before New Years Eve. It felt less depressing to have that already done. Also, if I went back to school with them still up, it could be February before I got around to putting them away. We started doing decorations specifically for New Years. We started traditions of making New Years predictions and putting them in jars for a year to check next year. I started doing New Years presents. I went and bought one more thing for each member of the family that was with us. We opened them on New Years Day. We did homemade pizza the night before and all sorts of crock pot goodies for the day after.
As I quit teaching and started writing full-time, I no longer dreaded Monday mornings or the back to work drag after New Years. Still, we held onto some of these traditions. My mother retired from teaching and she stayed with us longer over the break into New Years. The kids got older, but were still young enough that we weren’t keeping them up until midnight. We watched the celebration online from London each year because they had New Years at 7 pm our time. The kids got to see the fireworks there and went to bed. All was good for us then.
I always viewed Christmas for family and New Years for friends growing up. New Years had a lot of ups and downs for me then. There were a lot of romantic disappointments and complications around the New Year. It made a mess of my head, I think. I tended to go to bed early some years that I was stuck out on my own or somewhere I didn’t want to be. As I’ve gotten older, being out all night or among other people fighting sadness is less appealing to me. I’ve let some of that baggage go too as I took control of my own life and destiny. It is easier to be optimistic when you are fighting to follow your dreams as opposed to fighting to avoid the disappointment of deferring your dreams. Writing is my dream and a bad day writing is still better than most other days I’ve lived through.
Good luck with your New Year. Don’t be afraid to throw off the past and start something new.
Stuff!
Enter the Rafflecopter for a ton of prizes connected to the tour. Do it!
Check out Jay Wilburn’s excited apocalyptic series. Dead Song Legend Dodecology Book 1: January from Milwaukee to Muscle Shoals. Start the series here: http://amzn.to/1CvxbST
Dead Song Legend Dodecology Book 2: February from Vicksburg to Cherokee Continue the series here: http://jaywilburn.com/book-2/
Check out the first soundtrack to the series, The Sound May Suffer: Music from the Dead Song here http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/thesoundmaysuffer6 or on Spotify. The hard CD is also available on Amazon.
Jay Wilburn lives with his wife and two sons in Conway, South Carolina near the Atlantic coast of the southern United States. He has a Masters Degree in education and he taught public school for sixteen years before becoming a full time writer. He is the author of many short stories including work in Best Horror of the Year volume 5, Zombies More Recent Dead, Middletown Apocalypse, and Truth or Dare. He is the author of the Dead Song Legend Dodecology and the music of the five song soundtrack recorded as if by the characters within the world of the novel The Sound May Suffer. He also wrote the novels Loose Ends and Time Eaters. He is one of the four authors behind the Hellmouth trilogy. Jay Wilburn is a regular columnist with Dark Moon Digest. Follow his many dark thoughts on Twitter, Instagram, and Periscope as @AmongTheZombies, his Facebook author page, and at JayWilburn.com
