The November Gauntlet

My current life, at this point, is relatively surprising.  Who would have thought that there would be a point where I would not only no longer wake up dreading going to work, but while at work, kind of like it because there are some pretty solid peeps that I work with.  Definitely not I.  Definitely not I at all.  November was an exciting month for me.  I am now working the phones and splitting duties at work between that and my original job.  It's better than I expected, because the people calling us up at the helpdesk are not customers but sales associates who need help to help the customers.  I haven't had too many negative calls, although it does happen.  Besides that, I served on a jury for a day courtesy of the Dane County Circuit court here in Madison, which was actually a pretty positive experience.  The other jurors were pretty solid people, all of who had a good sense of humor for our stupid "he said, she said" misdemeanor trial.  Nothing serious or exciting, but still pretty positive.

However, there was a daunting accomplishment that I managed to kick some ass on: National Novel Writing month.  Last year, I tried and failed miserably, not even getting past four figures;  However, this year, as of 11-30-13, I met, and slightly exceeded, the challenge which is to write 50,000 words in the month of November.  I wrote 50,074 words in the month of November, writing every single day except for the day that I had jury duty.  It averaged out to a little over 1700 words per day writing.  Some days were less, others more.  But I started a novel, and proved to myself that I have the willpower to set deadlines and meet them with grit and determination.  It's not only not finished, but it's a pretty convoluted, confusing, kind of pretentious piece of crap, but it's my piece of crap.  I feel pretty proud of myself, not going to lie.  I decided to take the week off of writing anything, just chilling and figuring out where to go from here.  Initially, I had some notes on an outline I was following, but lost that about a third of the way through the month as I just lost the time to try and keep my notes going.  That's part of the problem, but it was a pretty unestablished idea at the beginning.  Right now, I'm going to take a little break from it and bust out a short story while I figure out how to finish the novel.  My plan right now is to finish, then not touch it for a while before editing it.  Then after editing it, let it lie fallow again for a while before taking another look at it.  After that, who knows.