You thought I forgot about you, didn’t you? Go ahead, admit it. You didn’t think I was going to post today.

It’s alright, I didn’t think I was going to post either. To be honest, I had no intention of writing at all today. You may ask and wonder why. Well, I’ll tell you why.

In mid-December 2011 I decided to create a spreadsheet to track the number of words I wrote. I expanded that spread sheet to show a target for 2012. I added many columns, put the dates all the way through until the end of 2012 and I projected just how much I needed to write on a daily basis in order to reach that goal. I set a goal of 500,000 words.  To be honest that number scared me. Scared me a lot. What if things happened or got in the way or what if I had a day I couldn’t write.

I backed that goal down to 450,000 words for 2012. I looked at the 1233. That’s how many words per day I needed to write each and every day in order to hit my daily word goal. Sounds so simple. It was at first, then it got harder as I started to stress out about the numbers. Then I started writing like a madman. I was writing on my daily update, Unorthodox writing tips, guest blogs, book reviews, movie reviews…

Wait a minute. I thought I was here to write fiction.

Suffice to say, it’s not December yet and I’m sitting on 451080 words on the year. I’ll do a postmortem of 2012 sometime in December after NaNoWriMo, but trust me when I say two things about 2012.

1) It wasn’t easy to write 450,000 words in as short a time as I did

2) I always felt like I wasn’t writing enough when I did write.

Yes, those sound contradictory, but when I write up how I got here, you’ll understand a lot more of how this year went and how those numbers kept on climbing. It’s been a long journey and if you’d like to read back through the year you may see what happened and what didn’t happen. I learned so much not only about my writing, but about myself, my family, my friends.

Am I excited to be over 450,000 words and beyond my goal? You bet your sweet aunt petunia I am. Will I stop now that I hit my goal? Oh my, tis to laugh. I shan’t be stopping any time soon. I’ve finally found a groove that took me all of 2012 to really find. Now that I’m in that groove, I intend to write even more words in 2013 and work on getting books into the hands of readers. Exciting times are ahead.

For now, I’m tired. I took care of Sputtery Truck today. I took my Favorite Daughter to a private volleyball lesson. We ate a wonderful Thanksgiving Dinner with the Millicans. (It was the Millican who scared Sputtery Truck into running right again). All in all it was an awesome day. Tomorrow will be filled with more adventure, more words, and more time with my family.

I hope you also had a wonderful weekend and I hope that you’re doing well on your NaNoWriMo goal. Just remember, that if you missed, you stalled, you had trouble along the way, 50,000 wasn’t the main point. The main point was to sit down every day and write. You also don’t need November to work on your writing. Build your own spreadsheet in google docs and go for it. Set a target, write towards it. You can do this. I’m proof that anyone can do this.

It’s been a very long weekend. So much has happened and I’m tired. I need some sleep and I will begin tomorrow to get into the home stretch of my NaNoWriMo goal. For now, I’ve got a tummy full of Turkey once again and it’s time for bed. Tomorrow I’ll be up early and back to work once more. Thank you for stopping by. Thank you for reading my ramblings.

Until Tomorrow!

WOO WOO!