December is upon us-The last month of 2010

When Writing, I record my progress now daily, and by week and month.

My writing week is Monday through Sunday. It had to start sometime and by doing Monday to Sunday, and then dividing how many weeks there have been in a year and multiplying by 52, or days there have been by 365, I can make estimates of where I will be after a year.

Even though now I can comfortably write 20 pages a day, 6000 words, having the time to do so before we settle into Hemet and begin a job hunt, I have used the gauge to monitor my capabilities. Where when I started 2 pages was hard to find the time to do, now I do ten times that. When I started NaNoWriMo at the beginning of November, I was worried that commitments for the house hunting and purchase would take me away from writing so I wanted to get 8000 words a day, and then the next level is 10000 words a day, which I have done on occasion and think I could make a habit of.

I finished the NaNoWriMo novel in 14 days

                Day                        Word Count

Day 1        8045

Day 2        8253

Day 3        8597

Day 4        8609

Day 5        4081

Day 6 & 7        8448

Day 8        8302

Day 9        8195

Day 10        4201

Day 11        8363

Day 12        6202

Day 13 & 14        12419

You can see that I combine Saturdays and Sundays together and sometimes I don't write on one or the other. (This last Saturday, the 4th, I did not write anything because of The Brea Borders Writers Group and then staying in Brea area all day.)

You Ought to Trust Your Mother finished at 93, 715 words according to Scrivener, and 5 more than that when I uploaded it to the NaNoWriMo site

A good feeling but it did not mean I finished writing on November 14th for the month of November. I added almost 61,000 more words after that, working on the Conquest Story, now having a working title of By the Book. My November Count shows I wrote 154,657 but that is not how I count months for my word count. If a month does not end on a sunday, then I record the figures until it becomes Sunday, and I start it on the first monday of the month after writers group. The Brea Borders Writers Group meets on the first Saturday, so November did not start for my accounting of writing until the 8th. The first Saturday was the 6th, so that was the last week of my October still. The first week of my November then being the Monday following the first Saturday Started on the 8th and just ended yesterday.

4 weeks of writing, on You Ought to Trust Your Mother, and By the Book, a total of 126,904 words.

Now once I finished the NaNoWriMo project I felt a lot of pressure for 2010 was off. It came out well in the 2 weeks I wrote it, showing me I can write a long book in that time. (20+ books a year pace.)

When the year started, I wanted 30,000 words a week, 1.5 million a year. But at week 3 of January, I had that heart attack and really didn't write much for 2 months. I also readdressed my goals and thought that 3000 pages might be more optimistic to push for.

As the year continued, I made that goal to be 4000 pages, or 100,000 words each month. 1,200,000 words by the end of the year. Today, this morning we are at 1,176.309. About 79 pages from the finish line. So I've added another 50,000 word to the goal for the next four weeks (My 2010 for writing will end on the 2nd)

What also will take up my time this month, is the house purchase, lining up workmen and purchase of appliances and flooring ready to go if we sign on Christmas Eve (My folks sign, they are buying the house and we are renting from them. But we have to do all the footwork.)

The Brea Borders Writers Group

Each month for nine years, though we cancel on some holiday weekends, we meet at the Borders in Brea California for our writing group. Currently we are six members, and three of us were able to gather for nearly 4 hours on Saturday. The first two and half we talked about the process of writing, about inspiration, about not closing yourself off to other novels and television for inspiration, about character studies and traits of people from real life. We talked about lap bands and Leonard Cohen We talked about songwriting for poetry. Then we did our readings. I was introducing my heroine and the team pointed out one thing that I needed to add to her character.

The Gratitude Log

Cereal–it is how I start my morning, and it is getting a little boring but it meets the Diabetes and Heart requirements I think. 1 bowl every weekday.
Vector Graphics–Can't really find a freeware or shareware one for the Macintosh. Have been using Numbers to solve that problem. I will have a movie up for By the Book showing how I used it and show off the battle sequences on it.
Inkjet Printers & Scanners–Saves the need for faxing. Print out whatever form someone needs me to sign, then sign it, scan it and email it back
Arco Gasoline– This is still one of the best buys for gas out here and certainly is saving us money during the recession. Even if it is a BP company and they leaked oil into the gulf. We save everytime we fill up. Why don't any other chains figure that out?
Reading–Without it the great number of stories I think up would be the poorer