Monthly Archives: November 2013

My big news today is that my NaNoWriMo word count is 25,541. I’m halfway there! Woo hoo!

Apparently I’m only doing ROW 80 updates on Wednesdays. I didn’t design it that way on purpose, but I keep missing the Sunday updates. Ah well.

My goal for doing NaNo in the first place was to explore my creativity, and that’s certainly going well. I’ve discovered that I can indeed write fiction, that my daily writing practice has well-prepared me for a project like this (where daily output is key), and that by exercising my creativity on a regular basis, even more creativity flows forth. I’d call that a success.

Of course, putting a lot of energy into NaNo means that there are other things that aren’t as high up on the priority list. Blogging is one of them. I’ve only been posting here about once per week, and about the same over at Starcat’s Corner. This week I posted one guest blog, and sent out a query for another.

I haven’t yet set up my giveaway/contest for Cultivating Self-Love. I have been doing fairly regular promos for it on Facebook, and I’m getting some pretty good response from those. I still have a long way to go, though. The same is true for my first book, Starcat’s Corner: Essays on Pagan Living. My publisher has posted that the Moon Books imprint is doing great, with several authors whose sales are doing quite well. I want to figure out how I can be one of them. I really need to ramp up my promotion (education and practice), and/or partner with someone who already knows this stuff inside out.

As for my other practices, journal writing has been going along pretty steadily, though I’ve missed a day or two here and there when a busy day combined with NaNo writing left me short on time. I’ve been keeping up with my goal for yoga, so that’s good. My eating habits have been fine, though I still think I need to drink more water. Dancing, drumming, and walking have fallen by the wayside a bit, as I’m a bit, well, consumed with this novel-writing business.

All in all, I think things are going well, and with some refinements (and space for life to happen in and around all these goals), my upward progress will continue. So may it be!

Metaphorically speaking, of course.

I’ve never been so glad to greet November. The craziness of October has dropped away, and my days are settling into a delicious routine that supports my creative work. I love it.

This is my first NaNoWriMo, and so far I adore it. My partner and I are working on a novel together (which will total 100,000-plus words when we put it all together at the end of the month). The greatest asset of our working partnership has always been how well we generate creative ideas together. This project has intensified that energy, in an amazing way. Not only that, our writing styles are complementary, and we’re both all fired up from each day’s writing session. We talk about nuances and plot twists and ideas for place names, all the time. It’s freaking fantastic. Our working title is The Door Is the Key: A Modern Faerie Tale.

My word count as of today, day 6 (and yes, I’ve already done my writing for today) is 11,209. On track and feeling great!

My wellness practices fell away a bit during the final busy week of October. But now I feel like I’m back to a good place. I’ve been doing my journal writing in the evening (does that make them “evening pages?”) because I’m busy with NaNo writing earlier in the day. Yoga has been regular this week: I get up and dressed, do yoga, make some tea, and then sit down to write. It works, at least on the days when I don’t have plans that take me out of the house in the morning. I’m trying to avoid those. But even when it happens, doing my NaNo writing in the evening has been fine.

Blogging and guest blogging are going okay. I haven’t set up my book giveaway yet for Cultivating Self-Love, but it’s on the list. I have been promoting it on Facebook and Twitter, in creative and fun ways. I’m reading Book Power by Kytka Hilmar-Jezek, which has some great promotion ideas that I’m going to integrate. Overall, I’m having fun and I’m so thankful for the healing power of creativity.