How’s everybody doing? I can’t believe this month has gone by so fast.
New Steps
I did it! I won NaNoWriMo. I hit the 50K word mark on the 24th, a whole 6 days early. My check ins, the five different short stories I picked to work on, and my morning pages were all counted toward my total. My highest word count was November 22 with 3,433 words. My lowest was November 12 with 853 words. I had no zero days. I did not update the site every day, so it looked like I had some much bigger days and a couple zero days.
I’m proud of myself, but to be completely honest, I am shocked by how easy this felt to me. Of course, I was easy on myself with what I included in my counts. The main reason I decided to do this (other than to prove to myself I could do it) was to build an everyday writing habit. I’m not so sure I accomplished that even though I did write every day. For the last week, I decided to see just how many words I could get in this month even though I already met my goal. I’ll give my final November word count in my next check in. Right now, I’m sitting at 56,683 words (and I might do one more writing session tonight to finish a scene I’m in the middle of).
To keep the ball rolling and to finish firmly establishing my daily writing habit, I am going to give myself a challenge for December. A thousand new words, six days a week (I get Saturdays off, just like in November). This time around, I am not going to count my morning pages. That works out to twenty-seven days of writing, with a cumulative goal of 27,000 words. In addition, I am setting a goal to type all the handwritten pages I accumulated during NaNo. There are a lot. Most of the writing I did was handwritten this month. It just worked out that way.
For a bit of a longer-term goal… I want to have my first story self-published by February. Now I just need to get my ducks in a row to do it.
The Breakdown
The Sword by Jean Johnson
This is book one of the Sons of Destiny series. It is a sci-fi/fantasy romance set on the Isle of Nightfall, which is in a parallel dimension to our Earth. Due to an ancient prophecy, the eight grown sons of the duchy Corvis are exiled from their homeland of Katan to the isle to fend for themselves. The four sets of fraternal twins are all mages, a couple of which are among the most powerful mages of all of Katan. The prophecy lays out their destinies which, being a romance, revolve around meeting their true loves. It also happens to sound like Katan will be destroyed in the process, hence the exile.
The Sword focuses on Saber, the eldest brother and heir to the duchy of Corvis, nicknamed the Sword, and an outworlder (from our universe) named Kelley Doyle. Kelley is pulled to the Isle of Nightfall by Morganen, the youngest and most powerful of the brothers, who per the prophecy is also their matchmaker. At first, Kelly and Saber don’t exactly get along, but destiny is destiny.
This is the third or fourth read through of this series I’ve done. They are a little older, the last one being published in 2009, but I love them. Each book in the series focuses on one brother and expands upon the story to reveal a greater destiny for all the inhabitants of Nightfall. They are in turn funny, romantic, cute, smart, steamy, and tense. Reading them is incredibly satisfying to me. I also just found out there are a couple spins off series, which I now fully intend to get my hands on and enjoy the crap out of.
Living Life
I am very happy for my four-day Thanksgiving weekend. I cooked the full shebang this year, even though it was just my sister and me. We ate until we were stuffed and played an escape room game to celebrate the holiday.
The last couple days I’ve been taking myself out of the house to write since I can. It has been true fall weather here in Tennessee. Mid to high fifties (Fahrenheit) and nice and sunny. Great weather for sitting in a nice coffee shop and typing away.
As always, thanks for checking out the site and I hope everyone is doing well. If you feel so inclined, check out my social media and head over to Medium.com for exclusive content.
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