Taking Stock of the Old Year and Fearing the New

by Sharon Kayne

I’ve never understood why the new year starts in the dead of winter. The days are at their shortest, plants are dormant, and many animals are sleeping. I know when I wake up on a winter morning, I just want to roll over and go back to sleep for two or three more months.

Okay, that last part is not entirely true. I feel like that every day when I wake up, no matter the season. Still, it doesn’t make sense that we start the new year when the planet is pretty dormant. Okay, not the whole planet. Just the part in the northern hemisphere, which is where most of the land masses are, so it’s most of the planet.

I’ve always thought the traditional Chinese calendar makes more sense, in that the New Year, which is also known as the Spring Festival, occurs in the spring—when the world is waking up from its long winter’s nap. That’s how you start a new year off right, I’d say.

Be that as it may, we’ve just seen another year end and have started a new one. And this always leads to a mortifying sense that it’s time to take stock. Analyze what you did over the last year and make a plan for how to do it better this year. I find this tradition almost as annoying as the fact that we’re expected to start a new year when the old one is still lingering like last month’s snowfall.

In truth, 2025 was a good year for me. It was my first year of being retired from my day job, and that part of the year was awesome. I had a great job, but after 18 years I was pretty burnt out about it. Stepping from a full-time job into retirement was an easy transition for me because I’d decided that 2025 was the year I was going to self-publish at least one of the manuscripts I’d written.

As it turned out, I self-published all three of the historical romances I’d written. With the calendar year closed, I went back and counted up all the books I’d sold and the royalties I’ve earned. The numbers are not quite where I’d like them to be. Let’s just say, I earned enough that being a novelist is only going to be a slightly expensive hobby.

When I retired, I was hoping that leaving behind the frustrations of my job, which very often exacerbated my depression, would lead to an improvement in my mental health. Sadly, self-publishing comes with its own set of frustrations, and I found that my depression had not retired. Fortunately, when you’re your own boss, you can take whatever mental health days off you need, whenever you need them. You can also take a cannabis gummy and go back to bed, and you don’t have to worry about being fired.

While taking stock of the old year didn’t make me feel great, staring my 2026 plans in the face scares the crap out of me. That’s because my main goal in 2026 is to get the first manuscript of my rom-com/romantasy series published by a traditional publisher. I know I wrote about the fear that accompanies the sending of your manuscript to a publisher back in November (“Sending Your Baby Into the World”), but I didn’t actually send it out then. I was busy at the time researching publishers and looking for a good comparable book and all that other stuff that leads up to the really scary query part. But then the holidays came up and I decided to push the query back until after the first of the year. Which is now. Gulp.

So, er, I guess it’s time to actually query my baby. It’s still early in the day, however. Maybe I could just take a quick nap first.

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