Accountability Wednesdays: Week 16

Before I get started today, I want to send out a belated “Happy Easter!” to all those who celebrate the holiday, and I hope you had a good one! This Easter was the first one that I really got to celebrate with my daughter since she was too young to understand what it was about the first two years, and last year I was working on the other side of the country during the holiday. Since I had the opportunity I staged a little egg hunt with goodies (cream eggs, M&M’s, mini-eggs, and little plastic bracelets) in plastic eggs. It was too fun watching her run around looking for the eggs, sometimes staring right at them and walking past. She also got a Build-a-Bear Fluttershy (My Little Pony) from us, which was the first thing she ran right for, which of course made my heart melt. Throw in some books and candy and a couple of games for her LeapPad from the grandparents, and the little missy had quite a lovely day, and therefore so did I. Little joys, my friends. Little joys.

Also, decorating eggs is a necessity! 😀

And now that I’ve thoroughly cleansed your pallet, it’s time to muck it up with a week’s worth of failure. o.o

Goal #1: Lose ten pounds and become healthier overall.

On the upside of things, I weighed myself this morning and I am almost three pounds lighter than I was when I had my meltdown last week. I’m not exactly sure how that happened, or whether either of those two weigh-in’s was accurate, because it doesn’t seem likely that I lost three pounds in one week without doing anything at all. But for now, I’ll take it.

The bad side of things is that I had an awful week for poor eating, due in part to the Easter holiday. I mean, come on, chocolate was everywhere. I also had a lot more pop than I should have, so I’m reasserting myself to avoid it this week. Water, water, water…maybe if I repeat it enough times I’ll start to enjoy drinking it. lol

The other bad side of things is that I did almost zero activity last week. I hopped on the treadmill once, and that was it. My FitBit should seriously have some kind of shock function that fills me full of voltage if I get fewer than so many steps in a day. >.>

But there is another upside! Kinda. See, I’ve got a plan. My plan partially hinges on the weather not being an ass, but it’s a plan none-the-less. I broke out an old book I’ve got called “Buff Brides” that I used when I was trying to lose weight for my wedding. It’s actually a pretty nice program, laid out in a simple-to-understand “do this on this day” system, and it helped me last time so I figure it can help me this time. The program involves weight training three days a week, starting with simple exercises that neither take too much time nor beat you out so that you end up quitting right away. It also encourages three days a week worth of cardio, so I’m going to hike up my britches, pay that my stomach holds itself together until the doctor’s can give me a more definitive answer about my gastronomic issues, and start my Zombies! Run! app again. I hope to start my new plan this Sunday – starting with a Zombies! run – but I’m not committing to it for certain because I’ve got some other things to deal with between now and then. If not this Sunday, it’ll be the following Sunday. Hold me accountable, people! Ask me how I’m doing and yell at me if I say anything other than “Great!”

Goal #2: Be more active on social media and work hard on my “author platform”.

This week was much like the previous week. I’ve been doing pretty well with Facebook and the blogging community, interacting and getting conversations going and the like. Twitter is my weak point and I’m not really sure what to do about it. For some reason it feels like a lot of extra effort to add that one site to my daily routine, and I think it’s because I can never think of anything to say that I can compress into less than 140 characters. I’m just too wordy, I guess. 😛

Goal #3: COMPLETE my zombie apocalypse novel, Nowhere to Hide.

This is the crux of my failure right here. I keep telling myself that I’m going to work on it, and I keep daydreaming about what it will be like when I’m 100% done and sending the file to Create Space, and yet it never happens. Partially my problem is a mixture of laziness and lethargy – I’ve been very badly obsessed with sitting on my ass and playing video games the past while – but at least part of the problem is good-old-fashioned fear. I long to have my book finished and published, but I also fear it. It’s that stupid human way of fearing both failure and success simultaneously. What is wrong with the human mind? A great many things, it would seem.

That said, I stand before you now (or rather, sit behind my side of the computer screen) and swear to you all that I am going to get something done toward this goal this week. Even if it’s just to go through and fix the invisible typos that my beta-reader pointed out, I will do something this week, I promise.

Goal #4: Write 500,000 words.

You know what? I’ve changed my mind. This is the crux of my failure. If there’s one thing that I know for sure that a writer has to do, it’s write. We have to write, write, and write some more, and then have a couple of cups of coffee and keep writing. I have completely failed this aspect of writer-dom during the month of April. I figured – I really did – that if I wrote and scheduled all my A to Z Challenge posts in advance, then I would have tons of time to write other things throughout April without having to worry about the blog. Technically that did happen. I’ve had time to write. I just haven’t been using it. I completely wasted three weeks of not having to worry about writing blog posts by completely failing to write anything else. This past week the only thing I wrote – literally, the only thing that wasn’t a Facebook status or a comment reply – was last week’s accountability post…for a grand total of 875 words. The really sad thing? That was actually a better total than last week.

So my second promise for this week is to write something every day, even if it’s just a couple hundred words of nonsense. This complete and utter laziness toward writing has got to stop. How can I ever consider myself a professional writer if I don’t write?

Accountability Wednesdays: Week 14

Oh, look at that! Another week has passed! My, how the time flies. Did you know that Easter is only a week and a half away? I need to make some more of my edible birdy nests!

Goal #1: Lose ten pounds and become healthier overall.

Are you all getting sick of hearing me talk about this particular goal yet? I’m kinda getting sick of talking about it, because the truth is that it’s been the absolute last thing on my mind. Okay, I shouldn’t say that…it’s been on my mind, but that’s about it.

It’s a combination of things, really, but if I’m truly being honest, I’m waiting to hear back from my doctor. I still haven’t gotten the info on the procedure I’ve been mentioning for a few weeks now, and in addition to that my usual doctor sent me for blood work last week as well. He wanted to check out my thyroid and a few levels (B12, iron, etc), and he’s also looking in several places for signs of arthritic problems, which are apparently common with the issue that we all believe I might have.

It’s sounds really weird, but I’m actually rooting for a couple of these possible issues to be confirmed. No one wants to be sick, and I can’t say that it won’t suck to possibly have to take pills every day for the rest of my life, but at this point I have so many complaints about so many different things that I am just dying for a doctor to say, “Yes, there IS something wrong with you, and if you take this medicine it will be better.” Does that make sense? I hope so.

Long story short, so much of my brainpower has been focused on waiting for my various reports to come back so that my doctor and I can discuss the results, I’ve been completely unwilling to care about anything else. Terrible excuse, I know, and you would think that having health problems would encourage me to eat better and exercise, but I guess you’d be wrong.

Goal #2: Be more active on social media and work hard on my “author platform”.

I’ve got to say, I’ve been really up on this one this past week. I’ve spent a ton of time on a ton of blogs, plus engaging in tons of conversations with fellow bloggers, plus having great success with my Facebook Author page. It’s been pretty top-notch. My week point is definitely Twitter, but I’ve even been gaining some followers over there, and having a couple of pleasant interactions, so it’s still all good!

Goal #3: COMPLETE my zombie apocalypse novel, Nowhere to Hide.

I should be totally ashamed of the fact that I still haven’t actually opened my Scrivener file and gotten to work on the last round of edits, but I’m not. You know why? Because I spent that time this week instead making this:

And I’m so happy with it, I can’t even tell you. I know it’s not the most super-professional-looking cover you’ve likely seen, but it’s mine. It was created using a photo taken by my father, and I made all the adjustments and additions myself. I even modified it using Create Space’s Cover Creator, so I know that when it comes time to set everything up it will fit perfectly. And to top it all off, I made a rear cover as well, which only needs to have the novel summary added to it.

In other words, while I’ve failed to spend any time on the actual manuscript, I am, at least, this one step closer to publication. Yay!

Goal #4: Write 500,000 words.

I’ve got to say, it’s been a bit of a weird week. Wednesday through Saturday I wrote absolutely nothing. Unless you count blog comments, which I don’t. So nothing then. I was having so much fun bouncing around from blog to blog, taking part in the A to Z Challenge, that I wrote nothing.

When I realized this on Sunday, I thought that I’d better do some kind of writing. I didn’t want to blog (I spent so much time setting up the A to Z posts in advance that I’m enjoying the little break, thank you), and I didn’t want to edit (should have, but didn’t want to). And so I found myself opening up the file for my Final Fantasy novelization, and seriously? It was just what I needed. I’ve been typing away like a maniac for the past three days, and with just that one project I managed to squeak 7681 words out of those three days. It’s not exactly the most important thing I have to work on, but writing a little bit of goofy nonsense that I don’t have to think too hard about has been absolutely great. I think I might just have to do it for a little while longer. What do you think?

Accountability Tuesdays: Week 52 and A Year in Review

This is it. Not only is this my last accountability post of the year, but at midnight tonight 2013 will be complete.

Image borrowed from seaandbescene.com

It’s been a busy and interesting year. I spent the first six months of the year working out West in the Alberta oil sands on a 2 weeks out, 2 weeks home schedule that involved a heck-of-a-lot of flights back and forth across the country and quite a bit of time away from my daughter and husband. The other six months I spent contentedly unemployed, enjoying just being home but also very busy with a growing toddler, your usual insane amount of housework, and trying to fit lots of writing and a reasonable amount of leisure time in there was well.

This year I turned 29. Thanks to my work out West I paid off both my and my husband’s student loans, and completed the payments on our car, leaving us with no other debt besides our mortgage. I also struggled – both during work and during unemployment – to work as hard as I could on my writing, both the fiction and the blogging varieties. This year I participated in my sixth NaNoWriMo and netted my fifth win.  I also (nearly) completed editing on my first ever finished manuscript, and I wrote a significant amount toward a fantasy adventure that I’ve been working on for several years now.

I wrote 248 blog posts this year. Two hundred and forty-eight.

My daughter turned three years old this year. I made her a kick-ass MegaMan costume for Halloween, which she loved, and I built (from scratch) a tickle trunk for her for her birthday. Speaking of which, I baked and decorated about a million My Little Pony cupcakes for that birthday as well.

We had an awesome holiday, I was given some truly awesome presents by my husband and my whole family, my daughter proved that she could quickly figure out the use of a kid-tablet that’s marketed more toward older kids, and here we find ourselves at the end of 2013, just waiting for the clock to tick over.

And so here is my last bout of accountability for the year, with comparisons to the “Wildly Improbable Goals” that spawned them in the first place.

Health and Body Image Goal

1. Get into some kind of shape that makes me feel good about my body again…I’m not looking at a particular amount of weight-loss or anything specific, just a state of physical being that I feel good about. I slate this as a wildly improbable goal because, as I’ve mentioned before, my work schedule makes devoting time to such a thing particularly difficult.

A year has passed since I wrote the above, and not a lot has changed outwardly. If I were to go hunt down a photo of myself from last January and compare it to a photo now you probably wouldn’t see much of a difference. I had periods throughout 2013 where I did an excellent amount of exercise, and periods when I was more slovenly than I’ve ever been in my life. I had periods during which I ate pretty well, and periods during which I deserved every second of the stomach pains that I incurred. I managed to work myself toward running a 10 min/mile, and then completely lost that ability.

But here’s the thing: though I didn’t lose any (significant) weight or inches, wasn’t able to go down a pant size or stick to a healthy eating routine, I did accomplish something. I came to a realization that while I do want to lose some weight and become healthier overall, I am perfectly satisfied with my body the way it is right now. I don’t feel fat, I don’t feel ugly. I feel like a mom and a wife and a tradeswoman, and that’s okay with me, even if I go a whole year more without losing a single pound.

Editing Goal

2. Finish editing my zombie apocalypse novel, Nowhere to Hide. It’s time to get this f’er on the shelves, damn it!

A good chunk of 2013 saw this goal effectively ignored, due to my complete inability to find a decent word processor to work from my tablet while I was out West. But when I did finally get to work on this goal, I really went crazy. Everything came to a screaming halt once the holidays hit, but to date I only have approximately two and a half chapters (which, I think, are the best-written chapters anyway) to finish editing. So while I didn’t technically complete this goal, I feel very good about where I managed to find myself and am confident that I’ll be able to do something great with my manuscript in the new year.

1,000,000 Word Goal

3. Write 1,000,000 words in 2013. This is the big one. Where am I going to find the time? I have no idea. But between blog posts, drabbles, new stories, and new scenes added to NtH during editing, I want to accomplish a total word count of ONE MILLION words by the end of 2013. Wouldn’t that be something? I think it would.

It became evident within the first few months of the year that this wasn’t likely to happen. There just weren’t enough hours in the day while I was out West in order to write the 83,333 words per month necessary to complete this goal. I eventually came to the conclusion that 500,000 words was a more reasonable goal, though I continued to refer to it as the 1,000,000 word goal, because wouldn’t that be awesome? Unfortunately, as with my editing goal, the holidays hit at just the right time to keep me from progressing quite far enough. As of the completion of this post, my grand total word count for the year of 2013 came to 457,067 words. I didn’t come anywhere near my original million word hope, and I came several thousand words short of my revised half-a-million word hope, but I have to be honest: I’m quite amazed with what I did manage to do. I’ve been writing for more than 15 years, and I don’t know if I wrote so many words over the course of the first 14 all together, never mind that many over the course of one year. I’m incredibly proud of myself and have every intention of blowing away that personal record in 2014. Here’s to acting like a real writer. 🙂

So there it is. One year ends, another one begins. I hope everyone has a great New Years Eve, and that everyone greets 2014 with heads held high.

See you all next year. 🙂

Accountability Tuesdays: Week 51

Ladies and Gentlemen, here we are: one more sleep until Christmas. My husband and I are anticipating it more than our daughter, I think. It’s going to be a good holiday this year. I’m certain of it. My Christmas Eve ham is in the slow cooker, the house is as clean as it ever gets, and our presents are waiting under the tree…except for the ones that Santa brings, of course!

I hope everyone has an amazing holiday season, whatever your celebration style. 🙂

And with that in mind, let me get my second-to-last accountability post over with.

Health and Body Image Goal

Seriously? Do we have to talk about this around the holidays? 🙂

I’ve been eating cookies and chocolates and we survive on fast food when we do our visiting rounds and present drop-off. On the other hand I’ve been working hard on the cleaning and baking and wrapping and so on, so that’s kinda like exercise, right? RIGHT?!

Editing Goal

Sorry; still haven’t so much as glanced at it. I’m hoping to get a chance to sit down and do a bit of editing sometime before the new year, but let’s face it…I’ll probably be playing with my daughter and her new toys…not to mention my new toys.

1,000,000 Word Goal

In recent weeks I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m not even going to hit that half a mill mark after all. There was just too much to do over the past few weeks, and in order to write the 46,000 necessary words I’d have to completely ignore my family over Christmas which just isn’t going to happen. The only writing I’ve been doing recently is blogging, which only adds up to 2857 words this past week, and 1701 words the week before when I hadn’t even had a chance to count.

But while my goals are in shambles, there’s still hope…a new year is coming! A chance for NEW Wildly Improbable Goals! And with that in mind, I’ll see you all after Christmas! 😀

Accountability Tuesdays – Week 48: NaNo Edition

Friends, I have been blogging on this site faithfully every Monday through Friday for many months now without missing a single scheduled day, so I hope you will kindly forgive me for my lack of post yesterday, Monday, December the 2nd. You see, on Friday (Black Friday, you might remember) my husband, daughter and I drove an hour and a half away to do some shopping. Fun times were had by all. Then, on Saturday, I had many, many things to do to get ready for my daughter’s birthday, which was accentuated by the fact that my sister-in-law and her daughter (my daughter’s cousin) came up to hang out with us a day early and have a sleepover. Then on Sunday I woke up early to decorate, survived a birthday party with friends and family, and then helped wrangle the daughter and the cousin all night while they played with the daughter’s new toys and generally had a major sugar high happening. Then, yesterday, when I really should have been resting after three days of non-stop stuff-to-do, we went shopping again and didn’t get home until almost 8 pm.

The seven or so hours of sleep I got last night were not enough. I’m just throwing that out there.

Also, I plan to spend at least one straight week doing nothing but playing video games. That is, as soon as we get the house decorated for Christmas (*cry*).

Health and Body Image Goal

Please see above paragraphs.

Seriously though, I’ve been having a few stomach-related hiccups that I assume are based on being too busy and perhaps a little stressed out, but I’ve actually been feeling half-decent lately and strangely I’ve lost a few pounds. I’m really not sure how, but there it is. Keep it up, body. Keep it up.

Editing Goal

November is officially over, which means that I can get back into the editing mode, but I don’t have anything to report this week because of [see above paragraph again]. Cut me some slack. It’s only been December for two days now.

1,000,000 Word Goal

I’m not going to tell you to see the above paragraph again, but you get the idea. Obviously I didn’t do any writing during that four days of madness spoken about at the beginning of this post, but I did get a hell of a lot done in the three days before that madness. I was determined to get NaNoWriMo over with before I had to start focusing entirely on the daughter’s birthday party, so I wrote like a complete maniac during Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and the result of those three days was a word count total of 11056 words. Not bad for three days, eh? I have to say, I was pretty proud of myself. That brings me up to just under 450,000 words. That means I have to do another 50,000 words this month in order to make it to half a mill, but I will tell you this right now. I am not going to stress over it. I would love to make that mark, but dammit, it’s Christmas. I’m not going to spend the entire month hunched over my laptop. 😛

NaNoWriMo Goal

As mentioned above, I wrote like a maniac during the first three days of last week, and the results were spectacular…I won! I validated my novel on the NaNoWriMo website and officially won my fifth NaNo out of the six that I participated in! I’m quite happy about that, if not a little exhausted. Most of my novel turned out to be complete and utter crap, but I really think there are some key things in there that I can work with to create something decent…that is, someday when I’m finished with all the other stuff I’m working on. 🙂

Thus ends another writing race season. I am definitely going to have a little relax now, please and thanks. 🙂

Accountability Tuesdays – Week 47: NaNo Edition

One wonderful thing about kids is their level of unpredictability, am I right? I’m using the word “wonderful” as a subjective term of course. I mean, who would have thought that after sleeping straight through the night for four or five nights in a row, my daughter would choose the night after I only slept about five hours to decide to wake me up every half hour?

Just saying, I mean, come on. That’s cruelty right there.

Moving on.

Health and Body Image Goal

My exercise this week has been cleaning. Don’t judge me. I have a birthday party coming up this weekend which will have quite a few people in my home, so I’ve been scrubbing. We also have Christmas approaching, so I’ve been deep scrubbing to ensure that everything is good for when we start decorating (right after the birthday party). And it’s been hard work, so I’m counting it as exercise.

On the food side of things, I’ve been a little healthier by drinking more water and forcing myself (most mornings) to have some kind of breakfast, but the key this week seems to have been Metamucil. I don’t know if it’s a coincidence or if I really did need the extra fiber, but I’ve been feeling so much better this week. No evil stomach pains in the middle of the night, no feeling like my guts were going to drop out of me immediately after eating. It’s been a good week. I’m really, really hoping that it will continue.

Editing Goal

This is the last week that I get to say “skip!” for this one. Editing activities will resume next week, and since there’s not a lot left I really believe that this is one goal I’ll achieve by year’s end.

1,000,000 Word Goal

I’m really proud of myself this week, not because I wrote diligently ever day (I actually completely skipped two days because of a shopping trip and a day of power-cleaning) but because I managed to squeeze extra writing in and beat last week’s total even considering the days off. All total this week I wrote 17,379 words, and over 7000 of those were yesterday. It proves that you can really get things done if you put a drive on. Unfortunately my drives don’t tend to come that often. 😛

NaNoWriMo Goal

There were some ups and downs this week (see aforementioned two day skip), but I managed to come out on top by the end of the night last night. I am currently hanging in at 43,023 words, which as of last night was over a thousand words ahead. Today I actually only need to write 203 words to stay on track, but my hope is to sit down and have another day like yesterday. I’m not holding my breath or anything, but if I can do even half as well as I did yesterday, and then do that again tomorrow, I’ll be done. Won and ahead of schedule. I had originally hoped to extend my goal this year from the usual 50,000 up to 75,000, but given everything I’ve been doing, Christmas shopping, cleaning, getting ready for the baby’s party, amongst other things, I think that just hitting the usual goal is a big deal. So wish me luck, and here’s hoping that at this time next week I’ll be telling you all about my fifth NaNoWriMo win!

Accountability Tuesdays – Week 46: NaNo Edition

Before we get into it today I have to ask a serious question: does anyone else, like, just LOATHE the new WordPress reader? Seriously, this little nested pop-up thing is driving me absolutely foolish. I was 100% happy with posts popping up in a new tab when I clicked on them. It allowed me to stay in the reader and click on multiple blog posts before beginning to read. It was quite comfortable to me. Now I either have to read each post as I come to it before being allowed to move on, or I have to click each post multiple times to get them to pop up in a new tab and then close the little nested pop-up so that I can get back to the reader. It might not seem like a big deal to some, but it’s at least three times as much clicking as I ever had to do, which is extremely annoying to me. Anyone else? It can’t just be me. 😐

Health and Body Image Goal

Last week on Fiction Fragment Friday I mentioned that I was having a rough go with NaNoWriMo this week, in part because I was feeling violently ill. Indeed I spent two straight days feeling very much like I was dying. I was headachy and nauseous, and everything single thing I ate made me feel like I was either going to throw up or be trapped on a toilet for the rest of my days. It wasn’t fun. After almost 48 hours of this I said screw it, I’m going to the hospital because I can’t handle this anymore.

Less than two hours later I posted this status on FaceBook:
You know you’re getting old when you go to see a doctor to complain about constant stomach pains and nausea and her response is basically, “Yeeeeaaahhh…you’ve gotta start eating better.”

My meeting with the doctor basically went like this: she got me to lay on the table so she could poke my stomach and listen to it through a stethoscope, and then she asked me all what I’d eaten over the past couple of days. That was the moment I started to see how this talk was going to go because with every item I listed her scowl got sterner and sterner.

Long story short, I am now actively trying to drink more water, eat more complex carbs, and taking a glass of Metamucil each day. God DAMN I feel so old.

That said, I have been feeling a little better. I’ve also been paying close attention to my stomach and I’m starting to be able to tell when I’ve made a transgression. My biggest issue seems to be breakfast. My body wants it, and reacts quite cruelly if it doesn’t get it, but I’ve always been one to skip the meal, not because I’m trying to save calories or anything stupid like that, but just because I’m never hungry in the mornings (even if the last thing I ate was supper the night before) and it just feels wrong to force food down my throat when I’m not hungry. But I’ve begun to notice that my stomach feels like complete crap if I haven’t eaten something within the first couple of hours of waking up, so I guess there’s got to be a change there.

I’m way too young to feel this damn old. 😛

On the exercise of things, I haven’t been doing any in the traditional sense, but I’ve spent the last few days literally scrubbing every surface in my kitchen, so that’s got to count for something, right?

Editing Goal

I’m skipping this section for the next two weeks. If you don’t understand why, please see the previous two Accountability Tuesdays.

1,000,000 Word Goal

I have to be honest, though it feels like I’ve done a ton of writing this week, it turns out that it wasn’t as much as I thought it was. I thought I was totally blowing away my total from last week, but in reality I only wrote about 2000 words more this week. Still, it’s an increase, so I’ll take it. As of the cutoff last night, I wrote 16,060 words this past week. That brings my yearly total up to 419,217. Just a little over 80,000 to go to get to half a mill. That’s six weeks at 13,464 each, but since I probably wont get anything done over the Christmas holidays it’s really more like five weeks at 16,157 each. Think I can step it up and make the half mill mark? @_@

NaNoWriMo Goal

The good news is that I’m catching up. Despite all odds and having two days last week during which I wrote absolutely nothing at all, I’ve managed to bring myself much closer to the goal line than I was before. As of last night I was up to 27,701 words, as opposed to the 30,000 that I should have been at. That’s still 2299 words behind the line, but you have to understand that during the days that I was sick I managed to fall more than 6000 words behind, so really, I’m doing quite well. If I can have a couple more days this week like the ones I had recently, all will be well. You’ll see. You’ll all see. @_@

Accountability Tuesdays – Week 45: NaNo Edition

Did you know that there’s only 44 days left until Christmas? I mention this because I know an awful lot of people who seem to forget to shop every year until pretty much the last minute. So wake up people! Don’t contribute to the massive hoards of last-minute shoppers!

I, personally, have everything bought except for one or two small things. That’s right; loathe me and know that it’s only because you secretly loathe yourself. MWA HA HA HA HA!

Health and Body Image Goal

I can’t give any good, honest information based on things such as diet and exercise, so I won’t even bother trying. I can, however, tell you about something I did this week that did just as much for my self-image as losing some weight would.

A few days ago I went through my entire closet (including the husband’s side, much to his chagrin) and gathered up everything that I never wear, focusing primarily on pants that don’t fit. I’ve been holding on to most of these pants in hopes that someday I’d wear them again, but the truth is that even if I did put some effort into it and lose a significant amount of weight, I’d probably never ever wear most of those pants ever again. Some of them pants I’ve had since high school, and since becoming a mommy there’s simply no way my body will ever be that shape again. Others were super-low-riding hip-hugger style, which is just plain not my thing anymore because even if I could be a teenager again I just find it ridiculously uncomfortable to constantly feel like my ass is showing. Others were possibilities – there was a chance I might someday fit into them again – but it could be years before I’m able to lose enough weight to squeeze them on. In the meantime, my closet would have been awash in a sea of unwearable jean material.

So I gathered up all those pants, even a couple of pair that had my subconscious screaming, “No! Not those! You actually might get into those sometime soon!”, threw them all in a bag, and tossed them in the Red Cross donation box outside the mall. And to be perfectly honest I felt super relieved. To hell with those pants. If I do lose weight I’ll reward myself with new pants. But in the meantime I refuse to base my physical self-worth on tiny pants that I might never have worn again even if I could fit into them.

Editing Goal

As previously mentioned, editing duties are on hold while I participate in NaNoWriMo, so I have nothing to report. If I ever manage to catch up and get ahead on my NaNovel I might try to finish off the last bit of zombie editing, but for now we’ll just set this one aside.

1,000,000 Word Goal

This week wasn’t nearly as good as I was hoping it might be, partly due to the special project I mentioned yesterday. All total I think I’ve spent at least sixteen hours on this project so far, so that’s a lot of time taken away from writing. Most of my problem, however – as pointed out by my husband, thanks love – is that I’ve been sinking back down into the world known as “wasting time on the internet”. Sure, I’ll write for fifteen minutes, but then I’ll wander over to Facebook and browse for half an hour, and before I get back to writing I’ll wander over to NotAlwaysRight, and oh, since I’m already there I’ll check out all the sister sites as well. I’m a social-media-and-comedy-website junkie, basically. I’m working on it. Really I am.

But in the meantime, I did manage to write 14048 words last week, and the overwhelming number of them were NaNo words, so that’s not too shabby. This week my yearly grand total surpassed 400,000, so between now and the end of the year I’ve got less than 100,000 to hit half a mil. Feel free to cheer me on! Cheering is very helpful, really. 🙂

NaNoWriMo Goal

Of the words written last week approximately 10,000 of them were NaNo words. As of last night (I’m not counting today yet since I haven’t done any NaNo writing yet today) I was at 15212 words, which is a little more than 3000 words behind. I did, however, write almost a thousand words more than the daily goal yesterday, so if I can just do that a couple more times I’ll be all caught up. Plus that special project I keep mentioning is almost done, so I won’t have that to be worrying about.

The real problem is that I’m having trouble feeling my NaNovel. I still hold that the idea was a great one, I think I just didn’t have enough time to really think about what I wanted to do. I’m mostly making it up as I go along and quite a bit of what I’ve been writing is complete and utter crap. That said, NaNo is not a time for fixing stuff up – it’s a time for getting words down at all costs – so I’ve been gritting my teeth and trying to push through. Hopefully at the end of the month I’ll have something that I can at least work with to create something better.

Wish me luck!

Accountability Tuesdays – Week 44: NaNo Edition

For the month of November I’ll be adding a National Novel Writing Month update to each accountability post. Fun? Fun. But let’s start with the usual stuff, shall we?

Heath and Body Image Goal

Put simply: not going well. I had planned to try and pair NaNoWriMo with some exercise every day for the month of November, but that was quickly cut short because of a slight health issue. I’m feeling fine now, but only as of late last night, so if there’s a chance of finishing off the rest of the month with some actual effort you won’t hear about it until next week.

The food half of this one is a bygone issue at this point. I’m trying not to be TOO bad, I really am, but we’ve officially entered the season of perpetual hand-to-mouth for me. Our house is stocked with discounted Halloween candy, and soon enough (November always flies for me) it’ll be Christmas treats as well. Lord help me, I have the least willpower concerning food of anyone I know. If only there was someway to make vegetables taste like Mars bars.

Editing

Well October is past and I didn’t manage to finish editing my zombie manuscript. I’m very broken up about that, actually. I was really close; I only had two and a half chapters left, and one of those chapters is much shorter than the others. I’m hoping that I might get a chance to rip through that last bit sometime this month, but I’m not thinking about it too much because I want to focus more on NaNo. If I can come out of this month with a brand new manuscript I’d be more impressed with myself than if I had a half-finished manuscript and a bit of editing done. But I will get that last bit of editing done as soon as I can because I’m so close I can taste it.

1,000,000 Word Goal

If there’s one time of the year when my word count is likely to skyrocket, this is it. I’m working on a brand new manuscript, and I plan to win NaNo, so look forward to at least 50,000 words over the next few weeks. In fact, look forward to much more than that because I’m also going to be blogging during all of that. For this first week of November (which includes the last couple of days of October), I’ve written 14598 words. An excellent start, I think!

NaNoWriMo Goal

Unfortunately, of the words I’ve written so far this week, only 4642 of them were for NaNoWriMo. That’s right, friends, I’m already behind. Quite a bit behind actually. As of the end of today I should be at 8333 words, and I’ve got to tell you, I don’t see myself getting 4000 words in today. On the upside, I’ve gotten past the boring beginning part of my new story – the part that gives you an enormous migraine because you just want to negate it all together – and now I can start getting into the fun bits. So here’s hoping that I can manage to make up those 4000 words over the next few days! Wish me luck!

Accountability Tuesdays – Week 43

As the season of spooking comes ever closer, my ability to get business done evidently devolves at an exponential level. In my defense, I did spend two days straight (Saturday and Sunday) standing in my kitchen with a glue gun, a metric ton of foam, and half a dozen cannibalized pairs of blue pants, and then spent a further day (yesterday) traveling two and from my hometown (an hour and a half one way) and back and forth between houses so that our families who live nowhere near us could see the baby’s completed Halloween costume.

It is at this point that I would like to mention that while I praise the creator of the hot glue gun, I also hope to never look at one again.

And with that bit of nonsense out of the way, let’s see how bad the week went, shall we?

Health and Body Image Goal

I am feeling, again, that I should simply stricken this goal from the list. While I’ve been managing to force myself to make small, good decisions (water instead of pop, chew gum instead of popping some candy, etc), I haven’t been getting any exercise in at all (unless you count the aforementioned 2 days of standing at a glue-gun station). In addition to that, my and my husband’s tradition of watching horror movies every night in October inevitably ends in my munching on snacks at all hours of the night.

On the upside, I haven’t gained any weight from all these poor habits.

I’m hoping to get back to a half-hour on the treadmill each day in November, since I won’t be stressed out trying to get the baby’s costume done. I will, however, be busy doing NaNoWriMo, so we’ll have to see how that goes, won’t we?

Editing Goal

As mentioned already, I spent a lot of time this week feverishly trying to finish the baby’s Halloween costume, thus I lost a lot of writing and editing time. Luckily I went a little crazy at the beginning of the week and managed to get quite a bit done. I currently have ten chapters completely finished, with five chapters remaining. I can’t honestly see how I could possibly get those last five chapters done by the end of the month, but I’m going to try. Even if it’s not perfect, I’d like to have the main round of edits done this month so that I can throw the manuscript at my beta reader, curl up in a ball to cry for an hour or so, and then move on to my NaNo idea. I’m sure by the end of November I’ll be sick as hell of my NaNo novel, so I can worry about the second round of zombie edits in December. 😛

1,000,000 Word Goal

Again, I lost a few days this week, but was quite fervent in the earlier days. Between editing changes and blog posts and the like, I managed to write 10,149 words this week. That brings me to just under 375,000 for the year. Since I’m hoping to push my NaNo word count up to 75,000 this year, I plan to be at approximately 450,000 words by the end of November. Then it’s just another 50-thou (JUST!) to hit half a mill. That would only be half of my original goal, but still a major accomplishment for me, since I don’t think I’ve ever written more than 100,000 words over the course of an entire year before.

And now that we have that over with for the week, I have less than 72 hours to try and edit 5 chapters. Excuse me while I go drown myself in coffee and chocolate.