Where's November?

Way back, ages ago, I meant to post something short—just to say “Happy Thanksgiving” to everyone. You know, just about two weeks ago, when it was still Thanksgiving.

I even had a photo to go with the post…

(We made an apple pie as our share of the family dinner.)

 

Then Thanksgiving happened, and two days later, we made a trip out to some friends’ Christmas tree farm to get our tree. So, apparently, it’s now time to start saying “Merry Christmas,” instead of “Happy Thanksgiving.” 

 

I suppose that also means that November is over. Even more, NaNoWriMo is over, and I survived the month. To be honest, the first week was easy—I only had one writing day in it, and writing 3K words in a day is relatively simple, done once. The last week was hard—I only had two writing days in it, but I still had to write 3K words a day. Make that 4K, because I didn’t want to drag the process out any longer. Still, I survived and came out with a lump of 50K words.

 

About this time last year, I had 50K words on a different novel, but it was barely the first third of the novel, and I had no idea what to do with it next. This year, the story itself has more fragments than an Egyptian papyrus, but it still fits together as a story. Now it’s time to turn that into a novel. 

 

For starters, I’ve joined a critique group set up by Oregon Christian Writers. It seemed to be my logical next step. If I’m going to finish that story any time soon, I need a way to keep on track and get feedback for how the story is going.

 Also important—figuring out how to tell people about the story. If I ever finish it, I will probably need to describe it in better terms than I’m using at the moment… “Yes, well, I’m writing this story. It’s kind of typical rescue plot, but I’m not sure whether the main character is somebody’s brother or this out-of-place-youngster that wasn’t even in the story in the first place. He showed up when I was writing the prologue.”

The next step will actually be writing something regularly. You will probably hear about this process occasionally, since it’s very big in my plans for the next couple of months. That, and holidays, and the rest of life.

So, a late Happy Thanksgiving and an early Merry Christmas to you all!