Month: November 2010

The End of November

elizabethcaulfieldfelt marketing, writing

We had a great book signing at Fireside Books in West Bend. There was a bigger crowd than I’d expected. (The local paper did a very nice write-up the day before.) The boys played Christmas music, and people asked a lot of questions about the writing process and the Suzuki method. And, of course, people bought our book! We love book signings!

Now I am back in Stevens Point, November is almost over, and I am nowhere near to having a successful NaNoWriMo.

I was looking at the NaNoWriMo page that graphs my word count against how much I need to write every day to reach 50,000. My word count is currently 14,089, so you can imagine how small my little bar is on the graph. I was feeling a little sad about it when it occurred to me that I wrote over 14,000 words this month. That’s amazing!

I don’t normally keep track of word count, but I’d guess that I don’t normally write 14,000 words in a month. I started patting myself on the back and thinking positive.

So, I didn’t write a novel. I didn’t finish a novel. But I wrote and I’ll keep on writing. And, hey, I’ve still got two days, right?

NaNoWriMo Nonsense

elizabethcaulfieldfelt writing

It’s hard to believe that this time last year I was participating in NaNoWriMo and creating the book that I spent the weekend selling. I had decided not to do NaNoWriMo this year as I didn’t have a project in the wings or one I wanted to stop to do something else.

But then….

A friend of mine talked me into signing up for it. I thought I would cheat a little–I would keep writing my Olivia mystery and just use the word count for what I wrote during November. I had hoped that this decision would force me to write every day.

Ha! I wrote the first three days of November, then I got 45 papers to grade from my students. They were very poorly written papers, so it took me a long time to grade them and left me horribly depressed. I’ve only written two days since then.

Writing is such a strange beast.

I went to my writers’ group last night and have become inspired to keep plugging away. I hope to spend the morning today writing.

Gosh, what a boring blog! Should I post it? I guess I better so I can log out and begin work on my novel.

Tschuss!