November Update & Photography

Hello Seekers,

Its been a while. A whole month really. So I decided to check in, see how you are doing and all that jazz. Good? Bad? Still stuffed from that family meal? Wow, sounds like you had quite the month!

For me November has been pretty wild.

I started off the month on the first all packed up and ready to go on a road trip with my dad and then  meet up with two of my bestest friends in Denver. About twenty minutes before we were going to go I got a call from one saying that the other was really sick and neither of them were coming.

I'm not going to lie to you, I cried. I cried for an hour trying to think of something, anything to save the trip we had been planning for two months. We already had to change our plans because the Jonas Brothers ... well, ya know. Ugh, so much drama!


Anyway, the girls and I decided that I should still go to Denver so my dad and I jumped into the car and hit the road for seven hours. Yes, you read that right. Seven hours. It was hot, it was long, it was a laundry list of terrible fast food. But it was a beautiful drive. In those seven hours I witnessed dessert, mountains, snow, wind, rain, sun.... yup.

My dad and I spent three days in Denver. We went to 16th Street Mall, Denver Zoo,  Buckhorn Exchange. Thanks Denever, CO for being such an awesome city to visit!

my friend Tasha LOVES penguins so i had to visit these little guys

I had a five minute conversation with this bird

this gorilla walked right up to the glass and sat down to do some people watching.

These guys were hilarious. The right one would wiggle, the left one would miss his pillow and would wiggle.

After returning home I began quite a different journey. I stocked up on paper and pen and set out on the road to NaNoWriMo victory! Now if you don't know what NaNoWriMo is, let me explain. NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month in which you are challenged to write a novel of 50,000 words in 30 days. Sounds extreme, right? It is. You lose sleep, you lose your mind, and if you are determined to beat this thing you will lose your social life.

Now i know what you are thinking.... NOOOOOOOOOOOO! But what you don't realize is that there is a wonderful community of writers who are fighting the same battle you are or have fought in the past and have still stuck around to help. They leave honest critique, the answer your off the wall questions, they put up their own words for adoption! These people are amazing!

This was my second year attempting NaNo. The first year i came out alive with 12,000 words under my belt. You laugh. You think that i failed. YOU ARE WRONG! i wrote! And that is the point of NaNoWriMo, making a habit of daily writing. That 50,000 word goal is just the carrot on the stick in front of you to keep you going.

This year i won. I actually won. I wrote 52,000 words in 30 days. I came out of this experience with a first draft of a story i wasn't sure i was ready to tell. I came out with a little boost in confidence. I came out with a love for the craft of story telling. That is the bounty i earned for facing down that 50k and charging forth frightened and unsure of myself and coming out victorious!

Will i do it again? Absolutely but not today. Today i rest and catch up with the world around me. I feel as though i woke up from a month long slumber and now i have to clean my room because i apparently write in my sleep and refuse to do laundry. *shrugs*

Just in case you were curious, this is a graph that kept track of my daily word count. The diagonal line is the suggested word count for each day and the vertical bars are my daily word count.

 

As you can see, i wasn't always on track with my words. I was low the first couple of days because i was in Denver, i came back strong, and then fell behind in week two and three. By week four i wasn't even sure that i could make it. Some how i pulled through and ended up on the other side.

 

 

Now it wasn't all nano and no play, i actually went outside (gasp!) and did things - hence the drop in word count. I saw four movies in the theater this month. Gravity (great visual and audio story - i don't care what you say about the plot), Free Birds (which i didn't like), Thor 2 (or Loki 3? either way good movie), and i watched Frozen (great movie) last night. No i haven't watched Catching Fire yet, its on my to do list! I am postponing the trama i will endure from those monkeys as long as i can.

 

So that is my November in a nutshell. I'm sorry you were not along for the ride but i'm sure there will be more adventures for us in the future!

 

How was your November and what are you looking forward to the most in  December? Tell me in the comment section below or send me a tweet. I would love to hear from you.

 

Goodbye November, Hello December

-Awel