Too Busy Still

It amazes me some days how I get so busy that I completely forget that I have a blog and like to update it. November was of course dedicated to the NaNoWriMo story I was working on. I continued it on into December and have only just started losing steam on it. I expect to pick it back up in the new year though, with the help of a new writing group that I've joined on Facebook. The only reason I don't right now is because I've taken some time off that story to focus on the holidays and my daughter's birthday which will be happening before the end of the month. I still have been keeping up the habit of writing every day, by updating outlines or coming up with new ones. That should help me hit my year's end goal if the trend continues and as of yet, I don't see why it won't. But it also occurs to me that perhaps I am not faithful about my blogging for two reasons. I use this place to rant and I haven't had much to rant about lately and secondly, I'm so busy writing other things that i don't feel the need to write and express myself here. I guess when I feel the urge, such as I did today, then I'll blog.

NaNoWriMo Done!

I know that I had posted that I finished NaNo on the 18th. And yes, technically I did so by attaining my 50k of words. But I decided to go farther this year. The best I have ever done is 96k in one month and that was writing in March of 2003, I believe. That was one novel that came from a script that I had written with a friend in high school for a creative writing course. I thought that there could be so much more to the story and therefore, decided to give it a shot. After that, I found out about NaNo from a friend and decided to give it a try. I have loved it ever since and participate, if not win, every year since. It is an accepted thing in my family now that I am only partly available during the month of November.

Well, this year, I wanted to push myself. So I doubled the goal. I wanted to write 100k by the end of the month. And I did it. Despite all of the setbacks and distractions, by afternoon of Nov. 30th, I had over 100k. My total validated by the NaNo program was 101322. That is a personal milestone for me as the most I have ever done for NaNo, the most I have ever written in one month and the most written in one month for one single story. The only other time I came close to that was when our computer was down and I ended up hand writing 92k during the month of August, 2006.

The best part about this is that at the end of each year, I set goals for myself for the next year of writing. When I first took up writing again after marrying and moving with my husband to the States, I thought it was amazing to write 50k in a year, let alone a month. The yearly totals in goal have slowly and steadily moved up through the year and I am pleased to say that last year I was able to reach half a million words written. And that was with plenty of time not writing due to my husband taking over the computer when he was sidelined by an on the job injury. There was even less time for me to write this year due to a lot of complications and commitments. But with this NaNo total, I am well back on track to hitting 500k by December 31st.

Next year, I'm going for a million.