November has been primarily about NaNoWriMo so I’m going to mention that first. What a wild ride! I was super excited when I hit my 50,000 word target and completed the first draft of 22 Cards. I feel like I talked about NaNo pretty much non-stop here and on Twitter, so that’s all I’m going to say about it for now 🙂
My goals this year (Samhain at the end of October is my new year) are focused around blogging, writing, social media and well-being, and my word for the year is FOCUS (you might notice it cropping up in a lot of posts). I love setting goals because it helps me stay on track with the things that are really important to me and it gives me something to come back to every now and then to check in with my progress.
When I talk about progress, I don’t mean achieving a thing someone else says I should have achieved by the time someone else says I should have achieved it. I’m referring to feeling more confident about what I’m doing, how much I’m learning and how I feel about my work. When I decided to Do The Writing Thing™ at the end of last year, I knew I wouldn’t be following a traditional path. That meant that I wouldn’t have neat little boxes to tick to tell me I was doing things well.
In a way, it’s difficult not being able to tick those neat little boxes. It’s also kind of amazing because pushes me to think more deeply about what I’m doing and why.
My husband and I escaped from the city over Samhain and spent a couple of days doing very little (and eating quite a lot) in the very beautiful Scottish borders. I’m terrible at switching off and relaxing, so a change of scenery was just the thing I needed.
I’ve tried to bring that ability to just stop and chill out sometimes back into my everyday life and I’m still not great at it, but I’m getting there. After NaNoWriMo (I know I wasn’t going to talk about it anymore, but context) I took a few days off to clear my brain out. The first couple of days mostly involved a lot of twitching because I felt like there was something I was supposed to be doing, but then I started to actually relax. Watching favourite shows on Netflix and getting a bit more sleep at night was so good and by the following week I felt recharged.
I hope you’ve all had an awesome month. What did you get up to in November?
