Just Dropping In

Long time, no post. I hope everyone who celebrates Thanksgiving had a wonderful one!

I think this might be the longest I've gone between blog posts in a few years, maybe even the longest ever. I just haven't really had all that much to blog about over the last three weeks. Partly because I just haven't had much to say, but also partly because I was deeply immersed in this year's NaNoWriMo.

I started it late this year due to the hurricane (or superstorm, or whatever it actually was.) Well, sort of late. I did begin it on November 1, writing longhand in a spiral notebook I'd bought in anticipation of losing power with the hurricane (based on what happened after Tropical Storm Irene, I took no chances when Sandy was bearing down on us.) So while we had no electricity, I managed to fill nearly twenty pages of that notebook. Which then had to be transcribed into the computer, which took a few days. Then I was able to get back into the story. And it just took off.

Some NaNos are a real battle. Tiger Eyes began life as a NaNo project and every one of those 50k words was a struggle. It wasn't until about 3/4s of the way into that book, that writing it became enjoyable. Then there was the year I did NaNo while in the midst of edits on several other books. Because of the past, I almost decided not to do NaNo this year. I didn't sign up until the very end of October because I wasn't sure I wanted to put myself through it again.

But this time around, the story came easily. Despite the late start, I had a bunch of days where I did 5k+ words, so I quickly made up for the lost time. And this project was fun to work on - for the most part. There were still a few days when I just didn't want to be bothered, so I took those days off and said to hell with the daily word count. And I found out that doing so actually worked to my advantage. I took a day here, a day there, and when I came back, I was a writing fool.

And now we're getting into the swing of the holiday season, so I doubt I'll be back to regular blogging any time soon. I'm halfway through the book that my NaNo project is going to be and the writing is going well, so I'm concentrating on that. It's a bit of a change from my previous books - this one takes place in 1885 in the Southwest, so it deals with cowboys and bounty hunters and a road trip through the New Mexico Territory to Chicago and it's been fun to write so far. Fun, but time consuming.

So, if I don't see you before then, have a Merry Christmas (or a Happy Hanukkah) and I'll see you in 2013 (unless the Mayans were onto something and the world ends on December 21st. :D)