This Past Month: November

(a.k.a. craziest writing month of my life)

Welcome to the end of this beautiful month of November.

It's been a crazy month. Blogging, writing, school, living, being thankful....

I want to take a moment to reflect back on these past 30 days.

 (Pictures from Pinterest. One last fall leaf spam)

Writing

Writing has probably been the biggest part of my life this November. I've never had a month when I wrote so much.

Coming into November, I'd been working on my novel, Found, doing my third rewriting of the first draft. As with most first drafts, it was extremely rough, and since I'd changed the plot yet again, I didn't know exactly where I was going. On the 10th, I finally finished, ready for a nice break.

Some of you readers might recall what happened after that. One word:

NaNoWriMo.

Plot bunnies attacked and made me participate in National Novel Writing Month. They held paws to my head, threatening to take away all of my sleeping hours if I didn't plot out Verity of Tomorrow.

I have yet to find the courage to defy them.

Now I have a 66k novel sitting on my backup thumb drive and screaming at me to do some serious editing, because half of those words are incoherent. Unfortunately, it's going to have to wait. I'm surprised my fingers are still on after such a mad writing spree.

I intended to take a few days off after I finished Verity, but I got so excited over a certain post on Helping Writers Become Authors that I wrote a dozen character profiles. In other words, I viciously interviewed my characters from Found to get all their dirty little secrets out. ;)

(This is the post I squealed over)  

A few days ago, I began to go over Found again, doing some serious, in-depth editing. One of my characters is being a pain at the moment, but I can literally hear him saying "What? I'm just doing what you're telling me since you're being so adamant about it. I keep saying that if it was up to me, I wouldn't act this way...."  

Since he's my guy MC, I'm starting think that I need to trust him more. Over the years of discovering his character, he's proven me wrong dozens of times 

And I've proven him wrong as well. *winks*

Working with imagery people can be quite fun at times XD

 (Pictures from Pinterest)

Living

In a short, I spent the first half of the month pining away for cold weather, and now I'm shivering all day long. It's been POURING where I live for the past couple days, which means I can't go biking, but I'm beginning to realize I like watching rain more than mountain biking :P

Ah, Pacific coast winters. ;)

This is more writing related, but I downloaded the Cold Turkey App to threaten myself to actually write when I say I'm going to write. Basically, it blocks certain sites (i.e. Pinterest, Facebook, blogs...all the addictive stuff) so I cannot access them during a certain time period. #selfcontrol 

And, to finish the summary, Christmas music is blasting in my ears all day long, even though the season in Found at the moment is the middle of summer.

 

(Pictures from Pinterest)

Blogging

This is the end of my first full month of blogging.

I survived.

*throws confetti*

To be honest, I was a little nervous to start this blog up. I could never bring myself to comment on any other blog until recently. "Just do it," I kept telling myself. "For goodness sake, you don't even have to say the words out loud! You're typing them!"

I'm so glad I pushed myself to do this, because diving into the blogging world has been so amazing. I didn't even know an online community of writers/readers/reviewers even existed. To my fellow bloggers reading this, you guys are awesome! Thank you for welcoming me.

In case you missed some of my earlier posts from this month, here they all are in a neat column:

NaNoWriMo, Writer Rants, and Some Updates....

A Time To Rest  

I Think I've Gone Over the Edge = NaNo + Snakes? & A Storyboard Reveal

One Week Of NaNo

Happy Thanksgiving

Almost December  

  

Thank you to all my viewers and followers for making my first full blogging month so fun. <3 you guys.

I can't wait for December! Expect a few rants on editing and a break as Christmas nears.

Rejoice!

<3

- Audrey Caylin