Sweet December, at last!

writing desk with medieval documents (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

All right, November proved to be a month with nearly too much to handle, but I have survived!

Jumping into the interesting and challenging program called NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), where the challenge is to write a draft of a novel that has a minimum of 50,000 words by November 30, was just one of the items which kept me moving during the month. It required many long stretches of pounding out words at my desk here--words that needed to work for a story and not simply random stream of consciousness--and many chunks of minutes with which to hit that completed 50,000 word mark.

I'm happy to report that I exceeded 50,000 a bit and verified the word count with the NaNoWriMo folks on Thursday morning (one day early) and now have a pretty good first draft to work with--revising, re-writing, editing, proofing--during the next couple of months. I'm planning to make this my next published book. Stay tuned for further developments!

Had a weekend pheasant hunt not come into play in the middle of November, or a five-day Thanksgiving annual family event here in northern Illinois, or a three-day trip to Detroit for a football championship game and visit to daughter Laura's, I probably wouldn't have had to write over three thousand words at a stretch. But I'm beginning to believe that I still function best when that deadline is looming ever closer--much the way I operated through my 35-year teaching career. I don't really recommend "seat-of-the-pants" functioning, but sometimes its the best--and only--way to get things done.

Now, I'm glad December is here and the novel challenge is complete and I was a winner. I have something on which to build a good book (I hope!) and can also now realize that the wife's birthday is next week and I haven't done one lick of shopping...not to mention that thing called Christmas hanging just a short hop away! Well, it seems as though I'm about to jump right back into things with time tight and a deadline staring me in the face. It never ends...MLA