Thank Goodness November is finally over. I usually love November for the intense joy of writing, but this November has kicked my butt in too many ways. I’m excited we’re now in December, a brand new month, with brand new goals, but that also means the year is wrapping up. Time to get my butt in gear and finish the year strong.
Here’s how I did in my goals.
November Results
NaNoWriMo
NaNoWriMo could have gone better this year. With oral surgery, a wedding to attend, antibiotics, cough medicine and everything else that went on this month, it was a struggle to find the time and the energy to sit down and write words. At one point, I was even close to 10K behind, but I slowly started to crawl my way back and try to make a dent in the actual novel I should be working on and not all my side projects. Thankfully, the last day of the month, I crossed the finish line on multiple projects and reached the 50K mark.
Continue Edits
This month, edits were stop and go. There were a few days where I was consistent in editing, and then there were more days where I wasn’t consistent at all. Unfortunately there were a lot of zeros on my spreadsheet for editing, but I expected that with it being NaNoWriMo and all. Drafting is definitely quicker than editing and usually gives me more words. But I did learn a decent trick over the last few weeks of editing backwards and keeping the story fresh in my head. Hopefully it helps me edit more words as we roll into December.
One Short Story/Finish a Short Story
This month, I worked a little bit on everything. I started a new short story and added that to my ever-growing list of short stories for the year. I finished two short stories this month and nearly caught up in my short story per month quota. By the end of the year, I hope to have 12 short stories that I can edit next year and see where they end up.
NYC Midnight’s 250 Microfiction Competition
The NYC Midnight Microfiction challenge went well. I was able to throw it together in a few hours, right in the heat of COVID and more than enough cough medicine to kill a horse. The genre was romantic comedy and I hope I caught enough romance and comedy to make it shine in only 250 words. Now I wait for the results.
Word Count: 50,721
Toward the end of October, I fell down my stairs and had to nurse that back to health with a metric ton of Ibuprofen and Tylenol. Then the first week of November I had oral surgery and had a tooth removed and had to take antibiotics and narcotics (which always make me queasy), then finally the week after that, COVID finally caught up with me and kicked my ass. Toward the end of the month, when I finally started to feel like myself again after a few days off, I managed to catch up on all my projects for the month. I really found the community of writers in my local area which helped me find the final push I needed to get some things done.
For the first time, I published some of my microfiction to Medium. You can read it and follow me here.
December Goals
One Short Story
I already have my idea for the short story in December. I already have a good portion of the short story from November mapped out. I’m hoping to work on both in the next month and finish my goal of 12 short stories this year strong. It’s been a really good year for short stories and I’m looking forward to adding another story to my ever-growing list.
Continue Edits
Edits are picking up again after NaNoWriMo and now that I have a direction, I’m ready to get moving and make as much progress as I can before the end of the year. I’m thinking if I spend at least thirty minutes a day doing some kind of editing, I’ll have more than I started with at the beginning of the month.
Poetry
On a whim, I signed up for a poetry competition. I’ve been looking for more publishing opportunities, and that will hopefully include poetry one of these days. The goal for the competition is one poem a day for 21 days. Either way, if I manage to get a few poems down, it’s more than what I started with at the end of the month.
What goal are you trying to wrap up by the end of the year?