November Goals

So, first and foremost, Happy Halloween! I'm kind of bummed that I don't have a cool Halloween story to share with you. I love writing creepy stories! But alas, I have been so busy editing, that I haven’t really had a lot of time to start on any new stories—not even short ones.

What I do have to share however, are lots of little updates/ goals:


1. Mira is back home with us and doing well. She gets along well with her older brother Sherlock. She loves playing with him and stealing licks of mom’s vanilla Frosty when nobody’s looking.

2. I just finished my first round of editing on my first completed (but not published) novel: Fearless. This is huge for me.

I started the editing process at the beginning of August. My fiancé and I had a four hour flight out to Las Vegas planned so I printed my manuscript. All of the paper editing was done on the plane ride out and back. Reading the manuscript and writing in suggestions is by far the easy part for me. The whole computer document editing took me much longer—but it’s finally done! The scary part is that the next step is looking into publishing… Wish me luck!

3. Happy almost NaNoWriMo! For those of you that don’t know, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. Tomorrow I will be joining my fellow authors in attempting to write 50,000+ words in one month—November 1st through the 30th. That pans out to be roughly 1,667 words per day or about 7 pages of double spaced Microsoft Word pages.

This is pretty exciting for me because this will be my first year participating. Between school and working two jobs, I’ve never felt like I’ve had enough time to dedicate to NaNoWriMo. This year, I’m taking the leap. Hopefully this will help me get into a better habit of writing a little each day.

Now I just have to figure out what I want to write about! Now that I’m done with editing Fearless, I could focus on the sequel that has been building in my mind (but struggling to spill out onto paper). But on the other hand, I could totally work on something else entirely. I was inspired by the discovery of Zealandia. Creating a world beneath the sea would be fun, especially if I made myself stick strictly to a science fiction genre. I feel like the possibilities are endless! Which can be a very big problem when all you want to do is stay focused!

4. Last, but certainly not least, it’s time to start getting ready for the Mock Newbery Book Clubs. This means that you will be seeing a lot more book review posts that are specifically geared toward books librarians think will win the 2018 Newbery Award. The book club I am going with has given us 95 days to read 20 books. That gives me roughly 4 days per book if I want to finish them all on time. 


This would be a challenge for me on its own (because I’m not a very fast reader if I’m not interested in the topic/ the way the book is written), but because one of the months dedicated to getting these books read is also NaNoWriMo, I don’t know if I will actually be able to accomplish this goal. I want to put my writing first, so everything else will be scheduled out around getting those 1,667 words per page written daily. But all in all, it should be interesting to see what kind of award winning books we have on shelf this year!

If anyone is interested in reading these 20 books with me, let me know and I can forward you the information! Otherwise, you’ll see them in my book review posts as I finish them.

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To those of you participating in NaNoWriMo this month, good luck and stay strong! You’ve got this! To everyone else—you’ve got this too! Have a good month! You might not hear a lot from me as I buckle down and try to focus!

--Larkynn