Checking in 17

Hello!

Someone paid me a great compliment yesterday. They told me that of all the people they know I am the only one they would trust at their back if the shit hit the fan. (I don’t know how well I would fair in a zombie apocalypse, but for the normal day-to-day stuff, I’m good to go.) She said she knows she can trust me not to repeat anything said in confidence. She knows I won’t lie to her. She thinks I’m smart and genuine and nice and won’t hesitate to tell her that she’s being impossible.

It made me feel really good because I like to think that I live my life with integrity. The fact that someone else sees it in me lets me know I’m on the right track.

The sad part is that these days people I feel that way about are very sparse. I don’t know if there are less people who are that way, or if I’m just not running in the correct circles to find them. Either way, I need to make an effort to locate these individuals before my faith in the future of humanity completely disappears.

I am well on my way to meeting all of my goals this week. Yay me. I have created a new spread in my bullet journal that helps me to track my progress more accurately, which helps me to achieve my goals. Seeing the progress I make each day is really inspiring.

I talked recently about attended a writing master class. As a result of things I learned while chatting with others, I am taking the Writers of the Future workshop online (which is a free course and full of a load of useful information from some of the top writers in the fantasy/sci-fi genres). I am also writing a story for the December 31st deadline of the contest. On one hand, it’s nice to have an actual deadline because it forces action and I can’t just keep moving it like I do with my personal deadlines. On the other hand, it feels so close! Unfortunately, I don’t currently have a story that fits the criteria for the contest, so I am starting one from scratch. I already have the idea. It sprang fully formed from my head in the form of a dream. I love it when my unconscious works for me like that.

On a similar vein of contests. I know a lot of writers are gearing up for the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). For those of you who don’t know what that is, basically you write 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days. You can do any prep you want, but you have to complete the actual word count in the 30 days. The breakdown is 1666 words per day. And when I look at it like that, it doesn’t sound THAT difficult. But considering I am lucky if I top off at 500 words in any given day and I don’t do that every day? It’s daunting. The other thing to understand about this is that any writing you do is going to suck. There are no two ways about it. These 50K words are probably going to be the worst writing you’ve ever done in your life. But at least it is out and on paper. You can’t fix what you haven’t written yet, right?

That’s all for now. Is anyone planning on participating in NaNoWriMo this year?

**NOTICE: For those of you who follow along, you will notice something odd about my postings this week. According to the timeline, it looks like this is my fourth post this week. The third check-in. Well, that is not entirely accurate. No, I have not overnight become a much more prolific writer. Check-in’s 15 and 16 were actually written over the last month. I posted them at different times, earlier in the month. But when I posted ‘The Many Flavors of Bravery’ article, I noticed, much to my chagrin, that they did not actually go live. So, I posted them again (and double checked the site) on the same day as the article.