I love a good C word

The first time we all chose a word for the year, my best friend, Deborah, told me my word should be "open." I can only hope that Deborah didn't know when she gave it to me that it would require being BROKEN open. Ahem.

Last year, the word that kept coming to mind seemed particularly ridiculous considering my recently broken open state. But when I told my friend, Ava Miles, that I was searching for my Word for the Year and she came up with the same ridiculous word -- LOVE -- I decided it was fate.

Just for the record, "Love" worked a lot better than "Open" -- or at least it made me happier this past year than the word "open" made me the year before. Of course, "open" set an extremely low bar...yes, 2012, I'm looking at you...

But this year when I was talking to Ava she immediately said, "Your word this year is YES!"

And I am not ashamed to tell you that my reaction was immediate and emphatic: NO.

No! No. And oh, by the way? NO.

Which meant that I now had to come up with my word all by myself. And I did! I came up with "connect." A perfectly good word. If not related to "yes" it is at least "yes" adjacent. It's "yes" with a few amendments. "Yes" with an eye to quality over quantity.

So I feel good about this year. And I feel good about this word. And while I'm at it, here are a couple of other C words that I'm feeling good about right now...

Commit
I pulled out all the stops a while back, trying to finish up my novella for the Once and Forever anthology. But after I turned that in, the holidays hit and I haven't gotten back to my writing practice. So this afternoon, while Deborah and I were waiting for The Desolation of Smaug to hit the big screen, we decided that what we needed -- other than some hot dwarf action...was to make a commitment. And so we did. This Thursday after work I shall progress to an undisclosed Panera location to work on my YA book, Witch Boy.

Witch Boy is finished. Mostly. It needs just a little reworking before it's good to go and come this Thursday I shall commence with the reworking. Oh, see what I did there? Commence! A word which begins with a C.

And which brings us to my next and final C word for this post!

Cover
By a stroke of magickal good fortune I've connected with a wonderful cover artist and we are now, even as I type, finalizing the cover for Witch Boy.

This is already a good year.