Writing-related accomplishments: Chapter eight of ALL BASILISKS (C3) has been tinkered with and is off to YWC. I’ve also kept up with writing a blog entry a day for Holidailies.

Ugh, WordPress changed and… I don’t deal well with change.  Someday companies will understand that things popping up and offering to do things that I don’t need help with at the moment is just irritating. It’s not as bad as the universally reviled Clippy, but it’s on that same path.

But back to writing — I’m going to work on the final act of the WIP. I’m really hoping to get the rough draft finished this month. Fingers crossed!

Now that November is over, it’s time to revisit my October goals and see how that went. (Uh, yeah, I never made a November goal post because I was doing NaNoWriMo and I sort of took that one as a given.)

October goals:

• Get an ending for the rough draft of the dragon novel. I really, really need to get this done this month since NaNoWriMo starts in a month and I want to have this ready to park in a digital drawer by then. So I’m going to do my best.
• Get the next chapter of ALL BASILISKS out to YWC. (I may need to rewrite part of it first. We’ll see.)
• Keep ten queries active.
• Come up with an outline for the NaNoWriMo novel. I tend not to plan, but I really am more efficient when I have a decent outline. Again, I’m going to do my best on this.

(I’m giving myself points for that last one because I did come up with an outline even if I then abandoned it and worked on something else.)

In any case, I’m giving myself an A+ for the month because I did it all. Plus I’m sleeping with the professor (me).

On to the December goals:

• Post every day on the other blog for Holidailies. (Note: I’m not saying that they will all be interesting posts. I try not to set impossible goals.)
• Get the next chapter of ALL BASILISKS out to YWC. (I may need to take a field trip and/or rewrite some of it.)
• Keep ten queries active.
• Rewrite the current query so it invokes a better sense of wonder. Or something. I’ll try something different in any case.
• Finish the novel I worked on during November. (This may be a bit of a stretch goal since it’s December and there’s always a ton of stuff going on, even in my life.)

(Judgemental big dog is here to keep me in line.)

Writing-related accomplishments: Another NaNoWriMo has come and gone. I have just over 51k new words for the month, which makes it my sixth consecutive win. So yay for me, and now I just need to finish this one before I park it for a while before starting the edits.

I will say it was a bit of a confidence booster to have the Literary Review’s “Bad Sex In Fiction” Award released today. My scenes may need work, but I am confident they are nowhere near as bad as those nominees. At least I have that going for me…

Anyhow, I have 51,256 / 50k or 77,473 / 80k (okay, realistically it’s going to be closer to 90k), which deserves this slightly angry baby elephant.

Writing-related accomplishments: NaNoWriMo continues! Things are moving forward pretty easily. Maybe too easily. Shouldn’t this be harder? What am I missing? I’m a little over a day ahead of schedule so 50k is within my grasp.

I’m currently at 42,539 / 50k new words (or 68,756 / 80k depending on how you look at it). I think that deserves a happy dog.

Writing-related accomplishments: I am slightly ahead of par at 29, 365 new words during this month. I may even finish the 50k a few days early since I have a five day weekend next week, but now that I’ve said that I’ve probably doomed myself.

I did run into a little slump a few days ago, but then I realized how to make things even more difficult for my main character and that pepped me right up. I mean, making someone else miserable has always made me happy in real life and now I know it works in fiction too!

In writing-adjacent news, I’m on the search for a slack bot that will set up a word sprint. Right now we’re using the “remind” bot, but that requires more manual setup than I’d like. If I can’t find an appropriate bot I’ll look into writing my own — looks like it’s not too hard to add them.

Anyhow, at 29,365 / 50k or 55,582 / 80k (depending on how you look at it), I’m giving myself a current grade of “happy frog”.

Writing-related accomplishments: NaNoWriMo continues! I have 20,037 new words for the month which puts me slightly above par — necessary since I likely won’t get any writing done tomorrow — and the words are coming easily. I’ve had years where every hundred words seemed to take an eternity, but this year has been a relative breeze.

In non-writing news, there’s an 100,000+ acre uncontained fire burning not too far north of here. A few smaller towns have been completely destroyed, multiple people have died, more are missing, and the pictures are horrific. As I’ve said in the past, I don’t think I’m in too much danger of a wildfire in Woodland because there’s so much agricultural land around us, but the air quality has been pretty bad since Thursday. The house is closed up tight and I wore a mask to walk the dogs last night.

All that is to say that my throat hurts and I’m not sure if I’m coming down with a cold or if it’s just a byproduct of breathing the air around here. I guess I’ll find out soon.

In any case, I’m either 20,037 / 50k or 46,254 / 80k depending on how you want to count things. I think that calls for a happy hippo.

Writing-related accomplishments: NaNoWriMo continues! I’ve added 8,433 words since the beginning of the month. There have been drunken shenanigans followed by consequences. But things can always get worse, and they are about to!

In other news, I filled in my ballot this evening and I will drop it off at my polling place on Tuesday morning.

Now feels like the perfect time to offer a typing tardigrade.