Sunday Salon: November, Nanowrimo, and notions

November is over and winter is approaching. Time to cozy up to the fire and do some thinking, reading, writing, or just some good old fashioned cuddling.  November was a hectic month with the start of my short story's class and National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). 


I love Nanowrimo because it not only challenges me, but gets me back in the habit of writing every single day.   The challenge of writing 1667 words a day for 30 days also weaned me off of my too many hours spent browsing, not getting anything done, internet habit.  I discovered Twitter was just a big, time consuming distraction that at this point in my life, doesn't serve a useful purpose for me.  So *gasp* I deleted my account.   And I've decided to set up a schedule for blogging.  I'll be posting at least once a week on a day to be determined.  Still trying to figure out which day is the best.  Sunday will remain the scheduled post day for Reading 52 Books in 52 weeks challenge. 


I've set a goal of 25,000 words for the month of December in the hopes of completing "Red Thief."  The story may end up needing more words than that, we'll find out.  I'm enjoying the story and learning so much about my characters.  I sort of skipped around in the story, jumping around, writing scenes out of sequence.  When I initially decided to write the story, I started writing in my mind, from somewhere midpoint in the story and worked my ways backwards to a beginning point.   Weird, but that's how it worked.  So when I'd get stumped as to what the next sequential scene should have been, I'd jump back to the midpoint and start writing from there.  


Joseph Bates of Novel Journey's wrote the most awesome post: Off the Clock, On Preparation, Inspiration and Time Management  in which he quoted Toni Morrison

"I type in one place, but I write all over the house. I never go to the paper to create. The meat and juice and all that I work out while doing something else..."

Wonderful post. Go read it, then come back.  So, true.  I found that by daydreaming about the story while involved in other things - cleaning, driving, etc and writing it in my mind that  when I was ready to sit down and write, the words flowed.  My writing time is more productive.  Although a side effect of all that, was I read less, spent less time on the internet and got side tracked somewhat while involved in other things. But hey, that's November for you.  My family has learned Novembers are for Nano and are quite accommodating. 

As you can imagine I didn't get much reading done and books reviews for the year have kind of fallen by the way side.  I decided to limit my reviews for the time being and also  limit the number of book tours to one or two a month for the new year.   I'm also not going to go all challenge crazy in the coming new year and will limit it to three or four.   I'll be hosting the Read 52 books in 52 books challenge again in 2011 and will meld the Mind Voyages in with it as a mini challenge of some sort, so I'm managing one challenge only.  If you want to join in, let me know.  

Sometimes you just have to stop, re access and find your balance.  Thanks for sticking around through the November madness and I'm working on catching up with everyone slowly but surely.  See you on the interwebs.

"Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony."

--- Thomas Merton