One Hundred Days…30 Days In

Where did June go? I had such a crappy month of May that I was terribly glad to see it go bye-bye and couldn’t wait for June to come rolling in. I had big plans. Really big plans. You can scroll back to the beginning of the month and see what I’m talking about —I wrote several posts about it—but, basically, I’m calling this my summer of discontent and shaking things up a bit. What I wanted to accomplish most was a summer of writing. I want to write 100K words in 100 days. I know, right? Who has time for that? Last November, I participated in and completed NaNoWriMo which is National Novel Writing Month where you write a novel in 30 days of 50K words or more. I didn’t write a complete novel—because my novels are going to be longer than that—but I did write 50K words, which I still feel is a fantastic accomplishment. The words I wrote are part of the current novel I am working on and is book two in a series of three fantasy adventure novels for people my age (49) and older. My motto is why let the kids have all of the fun, us grownups still have an imagination, although we might have to dig a little deeper to find it. I’m nearing the finish line of this book but I’m finding the more I write in it the more characters and events I want to add which can be a really bad thing. The main themes and plot can become convoluted and bogged down so I am trying to rein myself in and write the last few (many) words. Another positive aspect of these last thirty days is that I have discovered that the more I write every day, consecutively, in a row, the more I look forward to doing it. I read somewhere that a habit takes 21 days or maybe 28, to become a habit, so maybe that is what is going on. Every day, I’m looking forward to opening the laptop and putting words on the page. But it hasn’t been without its challenges. The first ten days of the challenge were spent driving back and forth between my house and my mom’s because I’ve been getting my bathroom updated. It should have been a four-day project but things happen so you just gotta go with the flow.  Literally. The crew performing the remodel hit the wrong pipe and sent water spewing all over the bathroom. Luckily, I wasn’t there at the time, I just stepped in the leftover evidence early the next day. Thankfully, after two weeks the job was completed and I could have moved back home with the cats. However, two of my three air conditioner window units have now gone on the fritz and it’s summertime in the deep south. I only like to sweat in certain situations and usually not in my own home so I decided to stay at mom’s house for the foreseeable future or at least until the cats want to go home. One of the other things I have been working on is keeping a journal chronicling my days as I write my way through this summer. I’ve never been one to keep a record of my daily life, but lots of my friends do, (Hi Gina! Buy her book!) so it’s something new for me. I titled the file “100 Days” on my Hello Kitty flash drive (that’s the storage device I’ve been using for all of my important stuff since last year’s virus wiped everything out) and the earlier posts that I wrote in the month about my 100-day journey were there too, and they were titled “One Hundred Days” so imagine my surprise on June 18, when I went to open the file and it wouldn’t open.  The only thing it said was FILE CORRUPTED.  Both of those files—same name—sorta, but completely different content. I was less than pleased. I spent an entire day trying to fix it, but to no avail. I’ve accepted the losses and moved on. Thankfully, my manuscripts weren’t corrupted--those were the only two-- but I have discovered “the cloud” and have said goodbye to Hello Kitty. You can kiss my grits! Besides writing 1000 words every day, I have incorporated 30 minutes of walking into my daily routine. It’s become like the writing—a habit, and I find myself looking (Can't believe I said that!) forward to it each morning. And I somehow managed to lose six pounds this month (I know, hard to believe, hell must have frozen over and pigs are flying all over the world). So that’s what I’ve been doing. As of this blog post, I’ve met my goal for June and have written 30K words in 30 days. Only 70 days to go, and yes, I am counting, every single word and loving every minute of it.