Take a deep breath, close your eyes and.... jump!

Essentially England, my English history and food website, is five years old today, so please forgive me if I'm feeling a little introspective.  I still recall sitting at my desk during lunchbreak, staring at the screen that said "Click SUBMIT to register your domain."  And I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and clicked. 

Nothing awful happened. Not then, not later when I started to comprehend the mammoth project I had so blithely committed to.  For the last five years, the England site has been a sideline to two engineering jobs, a p/t teaching job, a house move and the start of a new business.  It's the size of very two long novels, attracts half a million visitors a year and pays a large chunk of our mortgage.

More importantly, though, it's given me confidence as a writer. I've actually written more fiction in the last 5 years than I did in the 10 years before that. And I've even (shock horror!) shown it to other people!  And writing for a large part of my living - and dealing with the resulting comments, complaints, suggestions etc. - has given me resilience and a slightly (ever so slightly!) less perfectionist attitude.

So I thought that today is a good day to take another deep breath, close my eyes again and take another jump.
I don't do New Year's Resolutions - I mean, why wait? - but a friend told me that if you want to stop smoking or lose weight you should tell all your friends so they can sabotage your efforts keep you on target. It's supposed to work, so I thought I might give it a try.

**Deep breath, close eyes ...**

In 2013, I will locate some courage, ignore the part of my brain that upbraids me for arrogance in thinking anything I write could possibly be good enough, and submit at least two short stories to a publisher. 
(And hopefully you won't have to contact me in 364 days to ask if I've done it....)

There. Nothing awful's happened. Yet.