Hopes for the New Year

Do you have any special hopes for 2012? I really have to think about what mine are. I would really like to keep in better touch with my family, especially my niece, Katelyn. I really have to say that I miss her very much when I don’t get to see her.  I will be getting a new niece and nephew when my brother and his fiancée get married.  I would like to get to know them better, too. I want to keep making strides in my recovery from the problems that have plagued me since my mother’s death. I have come a long way, but I still have some way to go. My mother  died four years ago in March. I know that she wouldn’t want me to still be in pain so long after her death. I have to try to live the way she would have wanted me to live.  I want to be a good friend and surrogate sister, daughter, or granddaughter to the people that I care about. I want to be a good role model to the children I interact with when I do my volunteer work. I never want to stop learning or growing. I have already stated in my last post that I want to be able to put into practice what I learn. I really do have a lot to accomplish in 2012. I’m really anxious to see how it all turns out.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year to everyone who might read this post. I’m really feeling happy and optimistic about this New Year 2012. I’m learning so many new things and am looking forward to putting what I learned into practice. One thing that I still have to learn, though, is how to multitask. I want to be able to blog, write my books, and keep up with the social media that I belong to. I have asked myself how you do this all. I have asked myself that question over and over again. I haven’t got an answer, yet, but maybe what I’m doing now could be an answer. Maybe the answer could be to take breaks from doing one thing  and do something else when I need to. I think another part of the answer is to actually believe that I can figure this out. I guess it’s just part of my learning process. I think my New Year’s Resolution is to keep going on my learning process. That is a New Year’s Resolution  I really think I can keep.

My best Christmas present

I think I’ve given myself the best Christmas present that I could think of this year. I took advantage of a golden opportunity. Part of the prize for NaNoWriMo winners is to receive 5 free copies of your manuscript in book form. I couldn’t pass up that opportunity. I just hope that I did enough work on the manuscript to make it a quality book. But my friends have told me that I can’t second guess myself. I really was second guessing myself by wondering if I had published my book too soon. That’s when my friends said that I shouldn’t second guess myself. Now I’m going to take a breather, work on this blog, just calm down.

It’s ironic isn’t it?

I found an interesting little factoid on Twitter. In the opinion of the person who wrote that quote being a good writer is 3 percent talent and 97 percent staying off the Internet. That may be true, but here I am writing on this blog. I just uploaded my winning manuscript from NaNoWriMo onto Create Space to see my manuscript in book form and get the five free copies that were part of my prize.  Social networking sites are vital to a self-published writer’s  marketing efforts. That’s what is ironic to me about that quote. I really think our writing lives are so bound up into the Internet these days. I think what we need to do is set limits for the time we spend online. It seems that, to the writer of that quote, that there are no such things as limits. There have to be limits if we are to get anything done. I have gotten so much done when I was forced to be at home with no Internet, even as I missed it. I don’t think I could have met my goal and finished my story without limits. I had to decide what my priorities were and then stick by them. Maybe people need to learn how to do that, too.

I am a certified NaNoWriMo winner

I just validated my word count for NaNoWriMo and am a certified winner. . I have to say that I’m really proud of myself for this accomplishment. I really want the good habits and discipline that I learned to stick. I guess that is up to me. I’m going to show all of you  the badge that I earned below.

 

I just won the NaNoWriMo Mirrorball Trophy

I won! I won! As I’m writing this my word count on NaNoWriMo is 50,229. I  did it! I really can’t put words to how excited I am that I made the goal with a week to spare. At the beginning of the month of November I thought that writing 2,500 words a day was a heavy challenge. I think it really was because meeting that goal seemed to have taken over my life. But now that I’ve made it, it’s like a heavy burden or weight has been taken off my shoulders. I want to keep going to the 29th before I validate my count. But I don’t have to fret about not doing any writing tomorrow. I can just enjoy Thanksgiving with my family and friends. It’s just really amazing that I have met a goal. That’s what really counts.

How do you keep up?

If I have readers left I would really like to apologize to them for my sporadic posts this month. I’m doing NaNoWriMo and am determined to make my 50,000 word quota and be declared a “winner.” But I have a question about that. If you don’t make 50,000 words are you then a “loser”? I really don’t want to think so. Even if you don’t make the 50,000 word goal you have still brought something into the world that didn’t exist before. You have created something with great potential. Not to belittle giving birth, but I really feel that when I have finished a story i have given birth. But I am digressing a bit. What I wonder about is how people find the time to write their own blog, read and comment on other people’s blogs, and write a 50,000 word novel. I’m very curious about this because I’m going to be in the position of having to juggle those things soon. I know I commented on the fact that one of the blogs I follow has something like 10,000 visits in seven weeks. What a source of discouragement. I guess  keeping up with everything takes multitasking which is something that I’m really terrible at. What am I going to do? I’m picturing my buddy Wile E. Coyote going right off the cliff. All the work I have to do is the Road Runner coming up behind Wile E. and going “beep beep” which freaks him out and sends him right off the cliff. Anybody got any suggestions on how to deal with this? Seriously.  Help me please!!!