The Quiet Week

The days between Christmas and New Year belong to no one.

The obligations haven’t disappeared—they’re waiting on the other side of January 1. But for these few days, they’ve released their grip. The phone stops with its emergencies. The inbox stops pretending everything is urgent. Even the people around you move more slowly, expect less.

Most people fill this week with noise. They binge television, scroll their phones, stay busy with small tasks that feel like productivity without its substance. They’re waiting for the new year to grant them permission.

Writers can’t afford to wait. The waiting is where manuscripts go to die.

Every writer carries unfinished work.

It sits in desk drawers, in laptop folders, in the back corners of the mind. The memoir that’s two-thirds drafted. The novel needs one more pass. The business book that’s been “almost ready” for three years.

We tell ourselves we’ll get to it. When things slow down. When we have a clear weekend. When inspiration strikes. We’ve said this so many times we’ve stopped hearing ourselves say it.

The unfinished manuscript becomes furniture. We mention it at dinner parties—”I’m working on a book”—and the words have become so rehearsed they’ve lost their meaning.

But it hasn’t lost its weight. It whispers that we’re the kind of person who starts things and doesn’t finish. Who talks about writing but doesn’t publish. Who had something to say but never quite said it.

Every year the book stays in the drawer is another year of evidence that it will never leave.

I’ve run Publication Consultants long enough to see the pattern. Every January, manuscripts arrive that didn’t exist in our inbox on December 15. These aren’t new projects. Most have been sitting for months or years.

What changed wasn’t the manuscript. What changed was the writer.

Somewhere in this quiet week, they made a decision. Not a resolution—resolutions are wishes in calendar clothes. They rely on willpower, and willpower fades by February. A resolution says “I should.” A decision says “I will.”

Something about this threshold week makes decisions possible. The excuses that sound reasonable in October—too busy, not ready, need more research—ring hollow when you’re sitting in a quiet house with nothing on the calendar. Excuses require noise to survive. In the silence, they starve.

What’s left is the question.

What can I polish and publish in 2026?

Notice what it’s not asking. Not what you’d like to accomplish someday. Someday is a graveyard. It has no address, no deadline, no accountability.

The question is specific. Polish—work already begun, needing refinement rather than creation. Publish—not finish in the abstract, but in readers’ hands, real. 2026—these next twelve months, a container with edges.

The writers who answer this question specifically—with a title, a timeline, a plan—are the ones whose manuscripts arrive in January. The ones who let it drift will ask the same question next December.

Deciding to finish isn’t about time management. Time is never the real problem. We have the same hours as every writer who ever finished a book while holding a job and raising children.

What decision requires is harder. It means ending the protection of the unfinished state.

An unfinished manuscript can still be perfect. It hasn’t met the world and discovered its limitations. To decide to finish is to accept the book will be imperfect. That readers will misunderstand. That critics will find flaws.

The drawer is safe. Publication is exposure.

The decision to finish is really a decision about what kind of writer you’ll be. One who protects possibilities, or one who creates actualities.

The quiet week won’t last. The calendar will fill. The noise will return. The excuses will sound reasonable again.

You have this threshold. This stillness that comes once a year.

What can I polish and publish in 2026?

Write it down tonight. The title. The timeline. The first step. Make it specific enough that you’ll know whether you’ve done it.

Then when January comes, you won’t be resolving to write. You’ll be following through on a decision already made.

The deciding happens now. The manuscripts arrive in January.

What will you decide?

And once you’ve decided—once the manuscript leaves the drawer and enters the world—a deeper question waits. You already know how to write. You know what to write. But why? Why this book? Why you? Why does it matter whether these words reach readers or stay hidden?

That’s where the real power lives. Not in craft. Not in subject matter. In purpose.

We wrote The Power of Authors for the writer who senses there’s something more at stake than publication. It’s not about how to finish. It’s about why finishing matters—and why that question changes everything.

The Power of Authors: A Rallying Cry for Today’s Writers to Recognize Their Power, Rise to Their Calling, and Write with Moral Conviction. The book is available on Amazon: http://bit.ly/3K6o8AM. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.

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