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October Wrap-Up and Nanowrimo!!

Hello! I hope you all had a great Halloween! I had a fun time and got lots of yummy candy which is always the best part about Halloween.

This is a day late... like many of my wrap-ups are, but oh wells.

October Writing: October simultaneously felt very long and very short. Some weeks felt like they dragged on and I couldn't wait to get them over with and other weeks went by in a blink of an eye. Nonetheless, I managed to survive another month of classes and I got a lot of writing done too. I worked on a lot of revisions of Sterling Silver... which I thought would be done by now buuut they aren't. That book is being way more difficult than I thought it would be. October was mostly just revising and thinking about my future and what I want my writing to look like in the future. Later in the month though, I wrote my first ever children's story! I'm calling it Firespot, the Red Panda. Its about this little boy Thomas, who's parents are missionaries in Myanmar. He finds a young red panda on a trek and takes him home to nurse him back to health. My little brother, Sawyer, loves Red Pandas and has a stuffed animal red panda named Firespot, so my mom thought it would be cute for Christmas to write him a story about his stuffed animal Firespot. My mom is doing the illustrations (which are just so adorable! You can find a few pics of them on Instagram) and I think I'm going to self-publish this one. After that, I wrote another children's story called The Christmas Fairy about Emily, a little girl who goes for a walk in the woods on Christmas Eve (can you tell I like walking in the woods ;)) and finds a fairy stuck in the snow. She warms her up and helps her find her way back to her sister fairies to celebrate Christmas with. I realized that I really enjoy writing little children's stories. They're fun and cute and quick. It took me a little while to wrap my head around how they're plotted out, but once I did, they were super easy to write. I definitely plan to write more of them and I have some ideas about a missionary family in Africa and Australia that I think would be super cute.

October Reading: I didn't get a lot of reading done this month just because of how busy it was. I did read the short story Holly Black put out called The Lost Sisters, set in the world of The Cruel Prince and just yesterday I finished The Darkest Star by Jennifer L Armentrout. It's a spin-off series four years after the Lux series ended and one of the main characters is Luc who was one of my favorite characters in the Lux series. I have been waiting for that book to come out since it was announced and it was so good, I finished it in two days!

October Life Stuff: Well, I got sick twice (three times if I count the few days that I was a tiny bit sick) and this math class is growing more and more difficult. However, I am determined to keep my stress and anxiety level as low as I can for November since I think part of the reason I keep getting sick is because I'm so stressed.

And now for the Nanowrimo portion of this post. :) I decided, after lots of thinking, praying and talking with others, that I'm going to revise Second Star to the Right, my Peter Pan retelling and prepare it for traditional publication next year. I'm taking November, December, January and February (depending on how long this book takes to revise and edit) to polish it up and have it ready to query. I wrote a whole post on that, that I plan to put up next Wednesday. But, so, for nanowrimo this year I'll be working on that and on a Novella that I actually just came up with yesterday... Yeah, I'm that Nanowrimo-er. The one who decides to commit to an idea they got on October 31 with no plan and no plot. But, I plan to take it easy on myself this month and make it a novella, instead of a full on book. Right now, writing a full book just feels really daunting and overwhelming with everything else I have going on. I plan to get at least 30,000 to 40,000 words in that novella. Plus, if inspiration and the motivation strikes me, I may write some more small children's stories. In other words, I'll be getting to my 50,000 word count through working on numerous different projects at once. Yay me. ;) Today is the first day of Nanowrimo and I have written like 350 words so far in my novella that I'm calling Moonshine right now. I honestly can't think of anything better at the moment, but it's about this character that I've had in my head for a long time. Her name is Cynthia and she's a cheer leader who just suffered a major loss. Moonshine is full of werewolves, the process of grief and the bond of family.

So, yeah, that's what I'm doing this month. I hope Nanowrimo goes well for you all and that you have fun this month getting to your 50,000 word goal! :)

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