NaNoWriMo 2022

 

Oops. I finally got here, better late than never right?

I did participate in NaNoWriMo this year (still going of course). I hit 50k already, but will keep going for the rest of the month and hopefully beyond.

The difference this year is that I participated in NaNo as a rebel - rewriting/revising a novel that was already mostly finished many years ago.

With advice from my excellent critique partner, I devised a beat sheet in the days beforehand and then got to work on November 1. I've revised the beat sheet a few times as problems cropped up - thankfully none too major.

I was a bit distracted leading up to November, because I got the sad news late in October that my high school best friend had passed away. Because of certain factors, her funeral has not happened yet - it's next week on Tuesday. So it's been quite a wait for her family as well as all of us, her friends left behind.

Anyway ... that's been on my mind since I got the news. But NaNo has been quite a nice distraction as well.

I had a week off this week which was very nice, although I'd like at least two more! Thankfully the holiday season isn't far away, and so I'll get more time off then.

In between then and now, there is a lot of stuff that needs doing at work, so no doubt I'll be exhausted again by the time the holidays roll around.

I have not been feeling particularly creative this year, due to work being full-on as usual, and my "second full time job" the animal rescue still being busy as well). But I'm glad I managed to make myself do NaNo, as it feels good to have at least achieved something creative this year.

My hope is that I'll be able to focus mostly on revising existing books into the future.

I hope everyone out there is doing well. I wish that I was still heavily involved in this wonderful writer community, but alas other stuff in life has taken over. Maybe someday I'll get back to posting here more. I might try to make that a priority.

I am still alive in 2019!

Sharing some of my art, because I feel like some graphics
are needed.

Well, hello there!

Ummm, so yeah. It's been ages since I last posted! I'm probably going to be saying that for every future blog post I do, until I someday get back into the swing of posting regularly. I'm not sure when/if that will happen, but I still have a big soft spot for this blogging community so I hope it does.

I think one thing that's affected my blogging here is that I'm in touch with a lot of bloggers I met here via other means - on Facebook or Instagram namely. I'm also not really writing or editing at the moment. Things are very busy (again) with the cat rescue, and it's that time of year again when we have to prepare our financial documents for the annual audit. So that's taking a lot of focus.

I have many story ideas churning away in the back of my head, but really do want to concentrate on editing what I already have. The same old problem that I'm always tackling!

On the music front, my bandmate is already working on new songs for the next Woody's A Girl album, and he has asked me to send through songs that I'd like us to work on as well. I'm still working on narrowing down the list, but one problem I've run into is that some songs are missing tabs - I never recorded the tabs at the time I originally wrote/recorded the demo versions of the songs. So that's a slight spanner in the works. Still, I have enough of a list to send through to him as it is.

Elsewhere, I'm still a part of the little critique group, and comment on other members' shared excerpts when they're posted, etc. But I haven't posted anything new myself in quite some time.

Another thing that I'm getting off to a slow start with this year is my GoodReads Reading Challenge. I'm something like 7 books behind schedule, partly because I read some really tedious books that took ages to get through. I'm hoping to get some good reading time in to catch up. And speaking of reading, I'm part of a workplace book club that meets every 6 weeks or so (I think). We've already read one book, and we're currently reading the second. So I'll be checking out books I probably wouldn't usually as a result of that.

Anyway, I'm hoping that once the cat rescue stuff calms down again, I'll have more time for my creative pursuits. I do miss it when I'm not able to really get stuck in, so it's not like I'm not motivated.

I hope you are all doing well out there. Let me know what you've been up to!