Last night, after a couple of solitary sprints and a handful of 30 minute word wars via the NaNo boards, I slightly surpassed my 2013 word goal of 100k.

And there were confetti bombs and fireworks – in my head as I crashed for the night.

See, I hadn’t written a single damn word other than blog posts, twitter/facebook statuses and emails between January 1st and July 1st. July 1st, I started my JulNo project (although co-written with Mel Choly under the pseudo Melanie-Jo Lee), Windygates, which I’ll continue once I get Galleys Between and The Big Blue Shirt out of my head.

I’ve thought about upping my goal to 150k, but I think instead I’ll focus on another goal: editing 100k before the end of the year. This seems a more productive and manageable goal, what with NaNo running and other things I want to focus on in November and December. Galleys Between – Sacrifice is in final edits with Mel, and she’s got the third instalment, Deception. It’s going to need a fair bit of work, I think. I was rushing it… or at least, it felt rushed to me.

I’m really enjoying having Friday afternoons and evenings to myself to work on my writing. Instead of taking an hour and a half coffee break/lunch, I’ve been doing a half-hour, and using the other half hour to join a sprint or word war. And the third 30 minutes is either spent back at work, or doing a household chore.

A system is developing here, something that’s been missing (as I’ve moaned about before) since we started Belfire.

*knock on wood*

That’s for it staying this way!

I hope everyone else is having a productive and creative November, even if you’re not WriMo’ing your way through the month…

Keep at it, whatever it is!
<3 JL

PS: For you WriMos, by the end of today you should have completed at least 10000 words to stay on track.