November Review {part one}

Late again, I’m afraid. The holidays and recovery from the busy week have caught up to me, apparently. I’ll try to do better next week, y’all.

The next few weeks here at Writing to Inspire will be a recap of my November. I'm eager to hear about yours too, so please share in the comment section as you're able.

NaNoWriMo

November’s writing challenge, National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), was wonderful for me. I started out editing several chapters of an old favorite, but then I discovered writing crawls in the NaNo forums.

Writing crawls usually contain different tasks within a story format, and each task is writing related. For example, you might be challenged to write 300 words in 15 minutes, to sprint to 100 words, or to write for 30 minutes without taking a break. Some of the crawls even incorporate stretch breaks, snack times, and exercises to keep the back, wrists, and neck from getting too tight from being hunched over the computer (or pad of paper).

In the first two days of using the crawls, I plotted out a new story from beginning to end (rough chapter-by-chapter sketch), and two or three days after that had me typing out three full chapters. Those four or five days of working through some crawls netted me over 10,000 words toward a new story (including the plotting work).

The preset goal of NaNo is 50k words, but I easily surpassed that to reach beyond 63k. Somehow, this year’s NaNo was the most relaxed one I’ve experienced. I never panicked, didn’t feel stressed, and only hit one to three slumpy days, which is great for me… and I didn’t even get very worried about the lack of production those two or three days.

My writing goal for December is to get 20k more words on the new story, which is a romance that just might feature a ranch, cowboys, and second chances. And you probably guessed it: I’ll be diving into some of those crawls. I’ve got some unfinished ones from NaNo that I want to cruise the rest of the way through.

If you're a writer:

How do you stay motivated to write through the holidays?

If you're a reader:

What books are you most excited about this holiday season?