October Update

I’m gaining a new appreciation for text-to-speech. My husband uses it all the time, but I only really started using it after our son was born. It comes in really handy sometimes when I only have one hand available. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work for me in terms of writing, because I use too many strange sci-fi terms. 😛 Go figure.

Blog posts on the other hand, may very well be within the realm of possibility. (Some proofing is required; I’ve ended up with odd word inserts. :P) Not to mention there’s some retraining of my brain involved…when it comes to writing, I’m used to words flowing from my brain through my fingertips to a page. With text-to-speech, I have to consciously think about things like punctuation. 😛

I’m adapting to our new normal, but balancing being a wife and a mom and a writer has been interesting the past few weeks. The first two have taken precedence over the latter. Which is normal, and completely expected, but I miss writing as much as I usually do, particularly since Book 4 really needs to get done. It’s pounding away inside my head, waiting for me to get the time to type it all out. (Didn’t help that I had a couple of health issues to deal with.)

November 1st is a week away… (Crazy! I can’t believe it’s November already!) …which means NaNoWriMo starts in a week. 😀 Sure, it’s a challenge that can be done any month of the year, but there’s something about an entire community of people across the globe getting together and writing in November that is special. Not to mention the excitement leading up to it is contagious. 😀

I’m excited, although I’m keeping my expectations at modest levels. I have a newborn, after all, and he’s had quite the impact on our lives. 😉 Especially since lately he hasn’t wanted to sleep much.

The past two years, I’ve not done too well with NaNo. I took 2014 off completely; I was helping my parents redo our house, I’d just gotten together with my future husband, and between that and everything else going on, I didn’t need that kind of pressure on my writing. NaNo is supposed to be a fun challenge, not something grueling and stressful.

I started NaNo in 2015, but I’d just gotten married and was still settling in and my husband had back surgery the beginning of the month. Didn’t get as far as I would have hoped. That’s okay, though. Life happens. You adapt. I still wrote, even though I didn’t get as much done as I wanted.

This year, I’m going to attempt it, because I can. 🙂 It will definitely be interesting, because of how young my son is (and did I mention that right now he doesn’t want to sleep?!), but we’ll see how it plays out. And let’s face it—forward progress is still forward progress, no matter how small.

Plus, NaNo has a space theme this year. How cool is that??

On the subject of writing, I never cease to be amazed how you can write one direction and then hit a wall and realize that you need backtrack and take a different tack. I’ve written some good scenes for Book 4 over the past two weeks, but I hit a wall and couldn’t figure out why the story wasn’t progressing toward the climax. Over the weekend, the answer hit me: I had completely forgotten that a couple of characters need to react to a huge revelation in a previous scene.

That was the holdup. Now I know where I need to go…

…I just need my son to cooperate and take a nap so I can write it all down. LOL.