67 Days

I decided I’m not going to do NaNoWriMo again this year. I’m taking a slower approach and hoping to complete the first full draft of my Regency, Beneath His Touch, by December 31st. This gives me 67 days to write another 56k words to end up with 90k total. When I’ve been able to sit down and focus, I’ve been able to write a bit over 1k words a day. This is lower than the 1667 words a day for NaNoWriMo. To finish this book in November, it would take around 1900 words a day, something I’m not willing to commit to right now.

Unfortunately, I’m not a crazy college student with all the free time in the world on my hands. I have two middle schoolers who are in need of a bit more direction and support to make it through this next quarter while trying to keep up with martial arts and scouts as well. Not to mention all the normal holiday fanfare in the next two months that will fall on my shoulders.

But that’s what the group, Accountability Corner, I belong to is all about: balancing life with writing. Lately, we’ve been trying to think of our writing as starting a small business and what all needs to be done to make it successful. I still feel like I’m very much in the R&D and early product development stages. I know what I want, but I’m not quite sure the prototypes are living up to my expectations. It was surprising to see how many activities we could tie to the ones listed for starting a small business and even more so, how many of them we were already pursuing. Some of us more than others, but we were all headed in the right direction.

Speaking of R&D, I’ve been doing a lot of research lately. Not necessarily Regency specific research, although a lot of people have been visiting my Regency Resource pages, but I’ve been reading voraciously this year. I could only recall about 79 books that I’d read last year, but this year I decided to keep track with GoodReads and set up a shelf for books I read in 2009. I’m surprised that I’ve read 105 books so far and I have another two in progress as well. I tend to keep one book in the car to read while I pick up the kids and I forget to bring it in, so I pick up and start another one in the house. I’m curious to see how far I’ll get on that count in the next 67 days as well.

So, what are YOU going to do in the next 67 days?