End of 2018

As the last day of the year passes by, I find myself in a hotel bed, lounging on my phone with my beautiful wife by my side (and the princess demanding attention). This last year has been a good year. Not too much time away from family, (most) bills taken care of and on holiday catching up with friends and family.

Next year is going to be a bit harder. I already know there will be (a lot) more time away with work, cars are coming up due for maintenance and there'll be who knows how many unexpected issues come up.

But overall, I'm putting 2018 in the "good" box. Roll on 2019!

Vacation

Whooo! Back in Perth for a bit, enjoying some time away from work and time with family. The goal was to try and be a bit more relaxed and have some down time, but so far we've still been doing a lot of running around.

No matter, onwards and upwards!

South West

Very much looking forward to catching up with family. It has been too long.

Cleanup

We did a bit of a spring clean, and (amongst other things) took about three and a half thousand dollars worth of electronics to the tip.

Well, the stuff was about that much to buy new, many moons ago. Now it isn't worth anything - hence why it went to the tip.

The bit I most didn't want to chuck out was a 24 port 10/100 switch. Had always wanted something like that for the house since the mid 90's. Never mind that most switches now are gigabit and most devices that I'd want to network are wireless.

-_- Not impressed...

Nano - day twenty seven

Managed to punch out the 50k, whoo!

Feeling pretty good right now. The down side for me is that I didn't actually write a full novel, not the one I started at any rate. I did a rough outline at the end of October, and I got about a third of the way through the story.

But the goal was to crank out 50k words in November, more to get into the habit of writing than to write an award winning novel. Now comes the tricky part - to keep writing stories.

I like doing NaNoWriMo. Pretty sure I won't be able to do it next year due to anticipated work comitments, but we'll see how it goes.

NaNo - day twenty two

Yes! Just cracked the 40k mark. :)

As of writing this, I've got 40,053 words down. As noted earlier, Nano is more about quantity than quality, so I'm not going to be advertising this novel too seriously ... or anywhere. It started of as mainly a quest mission but I think I loaded too many targets into my story. The protagonists are seeking 30 items, and at the 4/5's mark they have collected eight.

I think I have more quest than novel. I may keep writing, but at this stage the plan is to stop when I hit 50k. I think there is too much in this story to get it all out in 50k words, but I'm not so invested in it that I am motivated to finish or polish it.

I do like what I did with a spreadsheet to lay out some groundwork, but I can see where I went wrong and didn't lay out enough. Having a blueprint definitely makes it easier to write. But I can see where I went wrong at the start and as a result, my story structure suffered for it.

I totally could re-write and fix it up, but like I said, I'm not that invested in the story (and between you and me, it's not that good). But it is a good opportunity to learn.

NaNo - day seventeen

As expected, so far nobody has asked about my progress on FB, so pretty sure I don't have too many FB friends that are into writing. No biggie, I wasn't expecting anybody to bite.

Progress report - today I'm at 32,000 words, which puts me about two days ahead of schedule. Brilliant! It's Saturday morning, so should be able to make good progress... BUT we have mud racing tonight (which means I should try and get some sleep during the day) and I'm working all day Sunday. #SadPanda

Looking at my spreadsheet, at one stage I was 4,300 words ahead of schedule, but then I had a run of bad days. On the plus side, despite the days I didn't write much, the lowest I got was 548 words ahead and never fell behind. That's with two days where I wrote zero words!

So far, looking good! :)