Working Holiday

First, congratulations to everyone who participated in NaNoWriMo 2017. I hope most of you did better than me, but I'm proud of all of you for trying. Proud of me, too -- I gave it a shot, which was fun, and tried some new things, which seems to be my latest trend.

I'm writing through the holidays this month, but I've decided not to use that as an excuse to avoid all the merry and bright stuff. I'm not a big fan of the season, but my crew is, so I'm going to try to do a little something every day to get me in the spirit to celebrate with them. Yesterday I did a mini-makeover of my daughter's room with some pillows, a snowflake throw and some cute animal objects. Today I'm starting to put together a winter art quilt. Tomorrow I'll write my cards and order the flowers I send my mom every year. After that I'll visit the no-kill shelter to make my holiday donation, and think of other stuff I can do for others. Christmas is always a little more palatable when you're actively giving or doing something just for fun.

I've been invited to join a small writer's group that I met during NaNoWriMo, which is startling (but very cool.) I'm seriously considering it. It's low-key, I like everyone in the group, and it might be time for me to get out of the Batcave every now and then. I'm no longer out in the public eye with my work (quel soulagement!) so I don't have put on pantyhose and makeup and pretend like I'm Bestseller Chick. I can just be me -- and that would definitely be a novelty. But I'm still shy, socially awkward and not especially politic, so I do have to think about it.

For the blog I've decided to manually upload all the old photos for my posts to Blogger's hosting system so I can keep everything here versus replicating the PBW archive into e-books. I have to do this in my spare time, so I've got ten weeks done and about seven hundred more weeks to go. It's a nice project, though, and will allow me to reminisce a little.

So what's up with you all? Anyone have their own tactic to work through the holidays? Let us know in comments.