October Is Here And So Am I !!!

Are you ready? It's the start of Q4 and the end of Q3, literally only 31 days until Halloween (Samhain), and the start of what I continue to call "Preptober" in anticipation of Sarra Cannon's 'Rough Draft Challenge'. Now if only the weather would cooperate.

As with last year I will not be officially joining the rough draft challenge via their site, but I will try to make it a practice to write about 10,000 words a week or 5 2,000 word days. I will not only have my little trusty notebook on my desk to track my words, but I will also try to be consistent with using TrackBear (mostly because I like bears and it seems to scratch that digital progress chart for me).

My goal for October is to flesh out the draft of Book 2, and hopefully in November I will be starting and finishing the draft of book 3. I have a title but I am waiting to have the cover for book 2 before I reveal it. I also want to post status updates about my progress on my facebook and instagram pages.

This might be way easier if I would just link the status updates of when I post a new blog too onto my socials but I am still day job hunting because I have not made a full business of my platform or indie author career yet. However I have made more of an effort to take care of my mental health by setting aside a few minutes (sometimes turns into an hour or two if I am able to have the time) just to write and create without judgement, the important thing is to get the ideas down so that I can rearrange and edit later.

I think I will (at least for the near future) have 50,000 words as my goal because that's what the now defunct Nanowrimo, has trained my little naive writer brain to do. Also because I want book 2 and book 3 to count as a full novel however as a quick google search has indicated, word count seems to depend mostly on genre and somewhere around 70,000 words?

It was hard enough getting 20,000 words in this draft.

Winter Bound is 78,784 words, (yes I had to look that up). If I have book 2 around 70,000 words I will be happy but my goal will still be 50,000 because I have the 20,000 in the draft already. Didn't necessarily mean to, but it is how it worked out :)

So far it's worked out quite nicely, lately (and I hope it keeps up) I'll have my coffee (at home and in my pajamas) sit down at my desk, have my 3 hour fall ambiance videos on in the background, review what I want to do and get done for the day and then just go for it, if i don't get it all done, then I'm mostly okay with that...sometimes. This doesn't always work when I'm not able to be home, but even then, that is okay.

It's hard taking care of yourself, but I promise it can be done.

So then, let's have fun this preptober! I know it's the middle of the week, but because it's the start of the month, and things can always change, I'll try to enjoy it while I can, and before I and if go back to the corporate world.

Preptober word count status:

Goal: 50,000

Total word count for the week: 0

Total word count since Oct. 1: 0

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