(A Tennessean sunset)

Tomorrow S and I leave for Washington, D.C. We will be there for a few days, come home for 48 hours and then drive to Texas, where we will stay until after Christmas.

S finished his last final on Saturday. He officially begins his last semester in university in January. Last week he had a couple of interesting job opportunities arise that we’re hoping to hear back about soon. He’s glad to be on Christmas break and I’m glad for the help as we prepare for all of this travel.

Now that I’ve published ‘Sortilege’ and finished the rough draft of ‘Sciamachy’, I’ve felt like a new person. They were my weightiest projects. I’ve been toying with another project (an idea I would publish under a pen name and leave it entirely unconnected to my C.M. Cox persona), working on my freelance writing and preparing for a whole new focus for 2015. I’ve been hinting toward this ‘big announcement’, and we are set to unveil it in early January (no babies).

As I’ve been navigating life in the last year, I’ve realized something: you kind of have to pick a thing a decide it’s worth believing in.
I’m not talking about religion; the ties to or separations from different spiritual beliefs tend to be deeper and far more complicated than what I am describing.

I mean, when S and I were dating, there was a day when I decided that he was worth believing in, that our relationship, our potential future, was worth believing in.
When I hated my job at the flower shop, I had to decide that happiness – and income from other places – was worth believing in.
When I finished ‘Sortilege’, before I began to send out queries, I had to decide that my writing was worth believing in.

All my life I was told that I should ‘just wait – real life was nothing like’ whatever I was currently facing.
I don’t believe in the real world. And neither should you.
Life is what you make it; I heard once that your existence is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you handle it.

Sometimes, you just have to decide something is worth believing in.
When you make that decision it changes the way you act, the way you think about whatever you’re now believing in. Suddenly, it becomes more valuable, important.
In essence, it is the decision to invest in something, be it a person, a project, or an area of yourself.

Don’t be afraid to distribute the weight of your life differently.
What should you be believing in?