Welcome Back!

Who, exactly, am I welcoming back? All of you, since there has been nothing to read for all of November? Me, because I haven’t blogged for all of November (which would explain why none of you have read nothing)? Maybe…it’s welcome back to all of us!

November was…an interesting month.

NaNoWriMo went very well, and for those of you who follow me on Instagram, you were there with me the whole time. To summarize, I pulled out a win, with a word count total of 50,535. It’s the least I’ve done for the last three years, but the end of the month got kind of rough, so I’m happy to have finished at all.

I’ve always known that reading fiction is an escape. That’s why we read, right? To get away, to imagine a place or a life that is different than the one we currently inhabit. My primary takeaway from NaNoWriMo 2021 is that writing fiction can be an escape, too. The last third of the month was a personal shitshow, but every day I launched Scrivener and put words on the page, and during that time, whether it was one hour or three, I was able to forget–okay, not forget, but push to the back of my mind–all the things in my world that were terrible.

When will you see the product of NaNoWriMo 2021? I’m not really sure. I’ve got three other novels/works that need revision and rewriting and polishing that I will probably get to before this one. But you will see it. Someday.

Looking ahead to 2022, I have the final pre-publication push for Whatever Will Be (y’all, it still hasn’t been proofread). I received my copyright certificate for it this week, so that is a step in the right direction! I expect most of the year to be similarly shitshowy as November was, but I think I’ll be working on another novel–one that’s nearly complete, but I think it needs a complete overhaul before it will be ready. And, of course, there will be weekly or almost-weekly blog posts.

My birthday was at the end of that shitshow month, and my awesome step mom bought this decal for me:

It’s still good advice. Let’s do our best.