M’kay, I didn’t reach the 50k word count for NaNoWriMo; the story is still not finished and I ended with 33,728 words when life kicked in. I know, I know, excuses, but it did keep my word count low – like less than 500 words a day, right around the holiday. Am I discouraged? Hell no! My story is close to complete, I didn’t make the word count but now I can relax and start on the revisions that have been bugging me.
See, since Mom passed away, I typically [extensively] self-edit as I write. When Mom was my critiquing reader, I counted on her editing skills, a lot. She’s been gone seven years now so obviously I had to rework my writing technique. I would write like crazy, then put it aside – it was typically short stories, so they were finished, unedited pieces. I’d allow myself to forget them, more or less; around a month or so later, I would go back and be able to read the story with ‘fresh eyes,’ reader’s eyes. I would be able to find any continuity errors and such, and fix them. Since I’ve been in school working on my MA in particular, I’ve been able to adjust that month long cooling off period to as little as a day, but I do prefer a three to five day break.
I greatly appreciate the peer critiquing review sessions in class! Thanks to some absolutely excellent questions, my protagonist Lynette has grown, considerably and has had a few extra adventures – mini-plots or subplots within the greater context, that I probably would not have thought of without those questions. I also feel I’ve improved on my setting descriptions; honestly, I’ve been confident concerning my dialogue pretty much from the start.
I’m in the last few days of my current class. I’ve written and submitted my discussions and responded to some of my peers discussions. I’ve also already submitted my final thesis paper – six chapters of Lynette’s story with some new writing and loads of revisions already implemented thanks to the critiques I received. Three days left of class and then a short break before my final class begins on December 14, 2015. I’ve already submitted all required paperwork petitioning for my degree. Whew! I’m trying to keep my head in the classroom more than the story, at the moment, make sure I respond to any questions or comments in a timely manner – but I am itching to get back into Lynette’s head, too.
I also purchased a new laptop and was setting it up right before NaNo ended, which is part of the reason I fell off on my daily word count. Transferring everything from my old Inspiron 15 (a 1545) to my new one (a 5551 with touchscreen capability) and the learning curve between Windows OS 7 and OS 8.1 gave me tiny headaches – my other new laptop that I purchased last July is running OS 10 and I didn’t want the larger learning curve between Windows 7 and 10 to interfere with school. Then I also set up old faithful – my purple Dell, the 1545, for my daughter as a gift. Right after I wiped it for her use, my new laptop crashed and I thought I’d lost all of my writing! Really, this thing was stuck on a green screen saying it was updating then it couldn’t update so was reconfiguring back to earlier settings, well that screen was on my laptop for a full day, a solid 24 hours! I did manage to use my desktop via my network and get my important writing off of the laptop so a second copy is there, and being paranoid, a third copy is on the silver Dell I bought in July! Hence, my submitting my final paper early – I was scared I’d lose everything. Sheesh.
But, black Dell (current 5551) is working properly; it’ll have the Windows 10 upgrade after I finish classes in February. I will make sure to play around on silver Dell (running OS 10 already) to familiarize myself a bit, too – and keep making backups of my writing to all three computers – desktop and both laptops, cause I’m a bit paranoid now. *grins* But that’s okay.
Luna is happy; she is in fly-catching mode and tracking the single fly in my house, protecting Mommy to a bunch of “Good girl!” comments. Stevie just wants me off the laptop and in bed, she’s ready to cuddle. So with that said, guess I am so outtie….