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I didn’t write much this month, nor did I teach any lessons for anything. I ended the year with a word count of 1456 for December. I wrote one poem and some short journal entries. The only big writing related thing that happened was being voted in as the secretary for our local area writers guild for next year. Next week, once I’ve compiled all the information, I’ll do my annual Writing Year In Review.

Real life had various holiday parties, Christmas with the extended family, etc. I went on a reading spree towards the end of the month and finished all of those partially read books that I’d left languishing earlier in the year. Some of them I had just 10-20 pages left on, some were more like 2/3 of the way left to go. So my December Goodreads list looks funny this year – “What She Left Behind: A Haunting and Heartbreaking Story of 1920s Historical Fiction”, “The Kill Fee” (Poppy Denby Investigates, #2 on audio book), “Aesop’s Fables” (audio), “Understanding Alcoholism as a Brain Disease” (homework for couples therapy), “FICTION FORMULA PLOTTING PRACTICE”, “Thriving with Adult ADHD: Skills to Strengthen Executive Functioning” (homework for my personal therapy), “The Creative Writing Student’s Handbook”, “A Kiss for Midwinter” by Courtney Milan, and “Clockwork Boys” by T. Kingfisher (audio).

I did not write as much as I’d hoped this month, as I was recovering from surgery, so my word count was the same as last month: 5100. I did not end up attending the 20Books Conference, due to that same recovery period. I did try to attend as much of it as possible from my living room over the internet, but that was hardly the experience I had hoped for. By the end of the month, I wrote a couple of poems and started back to work on the Lake House Mystery.  

In other real-life stuff, my youngest son developed some sort of terrible rash all over and had to go through allergy testing…only to find out he’s not really allergic to much at all. It was very weird. We celebrated Thanksgiving here at home, since I’m still not feeling my best self. I also read “Spare” – the memoir by Prince Harry, which was an interesting read.

This month I finally upped my word count a bit and made it up to 5100 words. I wrote one really long poem and some flash fiction. I outlined and did an entire worldbuilding set up for a short story to send to an anthology that ended up deciding not to publish this year after all. That was a bit depressing, but I guess at least I didn’t write the whole thing before finding that out.

In regular life, since I had the spinal surgery, I’ve been on meds that make it hard to think, so I’ve been crafting a lot more this month, rather than writing. I spent a bunch of time setting up an LLC for my arts and crafts business. I’m working on that project with a friend and we hope to launch a website or Etsy store early next year.  I wrote two board game inspired cross stitch patterns and crocheted three different sized Meeples, which I’m hoping to sell on consignment to a new local board game store. I also read “The Marriage Spell” by Jayna Morrow (which I beta read for earlier this year).