Last year, I took an in depth look into my writing habits (see Looking back on past writing goals and tweaking them for the future) and, without repeating myself, I think my tweaks were good. I passed 400,000 words for the year late on 12/30 which was later than I’d hoped to but still pretty good. Though I struggled to meet it this year, I’m going to keep the 500,000 word goal for next year for two reasons:

1. I really was only 100k off from meeting it this year which is close enough to make me want to shoot for it again
2. Adding 100k to what I actually wrote this year seems a good amount to keep pushing myself
3. Even if I don’t hit it, it will push me to write more while trying to reach it like it did this year
4. There’s a random extra bonus day this year because of the leap year! Continue Reading »

“I can’t wait to not be writing this book anymore.” -Me, to my husband yesterday

I spent so much time this month being a good little ML and writing articles about NaNoWriMo that I didn’t actually write a single post about my own personal NaNo journey which is odd. Usually I can’t shut up about how my novel is going and I bombard you with little potato updates all month but I guess it’s a testament to how freaking busy I was that I never had the chance. This month zooooomed by so fast, it’s insane.

If you’ve been watching the little widget at the top of the blog, you know that I passed 50,000 words on Sunday, November 27th. But keeping in mind my firm belief in finishing the novel not just hitting 50k, I still powered through the last four chapters finally finishing the book tonight in our area’s online write-in. Now, my novel is actually MUCH longer than the just shy of 55,000 words I finished the month out with both because I started early and for other reasons I’ll cover in another post so my feelings at the end of this NaNo are mixed. Continue Reading »

So, for posterity, we had a freakish out of season snowstorm on October 29th. Because there were still leaves on the trees, the snow pulled down many, many branches and whole trees. If you aren’t in the area, it’s really hard to explain just how massive the damage was and how, over a week later, it’s still not even really cleaned up. It’s like, it’s just snow, what’s the big deal, right? Many areas look like a tornado ripped through. Trees are snapped in half, big branches down everywhere, whole trees have fallen into the road and… just left there. Driving in some areas is… interesting.

But many trees down meant many power lines down. We lost power between 3 and 4 PM on Saturday, October 29th. We didn’t get it back until the evening of November 3rd. Our neighborhood of 400 homes was completely dark for 5 days. It was very freaky looking. (What deity has it out for Denville, man? Our poor downtown was completely trashed by the Hurricane Irene flood and this time we were the top town in NJ with number of houses without power.) Continue Reading »