Well, I made it out of the Grand Canyon after taking 8 students backpacking for 10 days, doing over 50 miles with full packs and at least 15 miles of day hikes without packs. It was great. This year's group took a bit more work than last year's in terms of getting organized and ready in the mornings, but they hiked considerably faster than last year's group which made up for that a bit.
I wrote almost every day in the canyon, and came out with an additional 10,000 words from when I went in, but those words were hand-written in a small notebook and had to be typed up. So on Nov. 16th I had 14,324 (ish) words and I was supposed to have 26,600(ish) words by then. Then, the husband and I flew out to Austin to visit my awesome brother and his amazing wife, and my mom came out too, and we celebrated Thanksgiving (and the days leading up to and away from it) in true McClain fashion, with large amounts of good food, good drinks and good company. I got in two 5 mile runs to try to make up for the feasting, but it was really a token effort, luckily I left behind a considerable amount of body mass in the Canyon so I had some to room to add on. In addition, I managed to set aside enough time to transcribe my notebook from the canyon, but I got no new writing done. So, I was still at 14,000 words by November 25th.
Yikes.
I hate losing, especially to myself. Last year, when I was unable to finish NaNoWriMo for the first time in 5 years, I managed to convince myself that the perfect storm of two weeks of Field Trips, followed by the week leading up to Thanksgiving/my wedding during which the majority of my family and part of Corey's descended on our home and let's not forget me getting the flu... was just not going to let me get 50,000 words written, and after a great deal of beating myself up, I'm finally ok with that.
This year I refused to give in.
So, from Sunday the 25th to Friday the 30th I became a writing MACHINE. At 3am Friday morning (or Thursday night if, like me, you didn't go to bed until 3am) I reached the 50,000 word mark with my novel. WOOT!
I ordered a winner's T-Shirt. It says 50,000 words, 30 days, 0 excuses.
Ain't that the truth?
So... Now it's December and life seems free and easy, even though there's still tons to do, including keep working on the Novel that is nowhere near finished at the 50,000 word mark.
But life is good, and with one week down I only have 2.5 weeks of classes left before winter break, something for which I am quite grateful. I may post some excerpts from the novel in progress over the coming weeks.
