Generational Knowledge

I'm proud to report that I am still on track to hit my goal of 30,000 words on the sequel to Firemark this month. My outline has helped me write fast as the ideas are already there and ready to go. To be honest with you, I've considered keeping up the 1k a day thing into December to hit 50,000. Most nights I've been able to hit 1,000 words or exceed it in under an hour, which I think is excellent. I've just crossed the threshold of 10k, and as you can see on my progress report that all adds up over time.

Now that I've come out of the closet about my noveling habit, people have often marveled at how much time that must take me. Like anything else, I've found that a little bit a day can add up into something substantial. This year's NaNo has been a great reminder for me. I've also considered that while I don't want to set myself up for failure, I could even try to graduate up to noveling every other month in the future, depending on editing and other to-dos for the pursuit of publication.

In other news, I attended my second meeting with the Virginia Romance Writers where I sat with some new ladies and made some more friends. All of them are also doing NaNoWriMo, also known as National Novel Writing Month, and two of them have a background as educators. One is in her thirty-seventh year as an English teacher and author of The Edge of War, and the other one is a retired science teacher turned administrator and author of The Wives of Lucifer. I enjoyed talking with both of these ladies and learning from their experience and stories they shared with me. Their presence alone proved that pursuing a career as an author while maintaining life as an educator, a task notorious difficult itself, is possible. I enjoyed the conversation and sat like a sponge absorbing the stories of their experiences, both good and bad, noting lessons learned the hard way.

Additionally, these ladies also were able to speak from experience when discussing my day job, and the retirement benefits that come with it, another period of the conversation during which I sat sponge-like. We exchanged information and am hoping they'll be open to questions as I prepare to embark on my journey in 2019. More about what this journey entails to come in December.

The point is that whatever journey we are on someone somewhere has already forged in some way. Seeking out the generational knowledge of those that have gone ahead of us hardly ever is a bad thing.

Onward!

Kathryn