October 2020 Monthly Wrap-Up

Hello! It’s November 1st, and time to say hello to the holiday season and hustle and bustle until the end of the year. But before we get there, what happened last month?

Books Read:

I realized this month why I was having such a hard time getting things read. My husband is home all. the. time. Don’t get me wrong, I love him, but when he had a job, I’d wake up, fling the curtains wide open, and read before or after (often both) teaching school. Now, I can’t fling the curtains open because he’s often sleeping. Then my boy comes in at 11 PM to write code on my dh’s computer, and after that, my boy comes and sits on my bed to watch a video by Jaiden Animations, and then they watch Cutthroat Kitchen. Who can read with all that going on?

Anyway, I only read 6 books this month. I don’t expect it to get any better with NaNoWriMo starting today. I need to read 19 more books to finish my Goodreads Challenge. Worst case scenario, I can squeeze in Life After Legend I and II in a half hour. While I don’t plan on reading a lot of short books to win my Goodreads challenge, since I know I’ll be close, I might choose to squeeze in a few books that way.

Hopefully my dh will get a job next year and I can get my reading on track.

Anyhoo, this is what I read:

• The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue – V.E. Schwab
• The First Hostage – Joel C. Rosenberg
• Make Up Break Up – Lily Menon
• The Red Scrolls of Magic – Cassandra Clare
• Mirror Gate – Jeff Wheeler
• A Reaper at the Gates – Sabaa Tahir (reread)

I almost finished Julie Kagawa’s Talon in time to include it on this list, but I started NaNoWriMo instead. I had an hour left in the book and I had to go to sleep. I’m starting The Scorpio Races today, which is something I planned to do for nearly a year already (since it starts on November 1st, I’ll start reading it on that day).

Writing:

Woo! Time for NaNoWriMo! In the summer of 2019 I started to come up with the germ of this story: a girl, who is a lady-in-waiting to the princess, is being held as a prisoner in her enemy country after she was captured in a war. When she discovers that they intend to kill her, she ends up running off with the handsome gray ace son of a duke, and they end up getting shipwrecked on a deserted island.

I always thought it would be funny if I started querying my NaNoWriMo novel (from 2018) on December 1st. THE BRIGHTNESS OF SHADOW is not ready, and since I’m writing another novel now, it’s unlikely to get ready in the next 30 days. But you know what? It’s 95% ready. I’ve had someone say to me “Why isn’t this published already!?!” Will that last 5% make the difference between a rejection and an acceptance? Probably not. Especially since the first half of the book is completely ready to go, and the only pages I haven’t gone over for the last time (before querying) aren’t even pages an agent will see unless they request a full.

That last 5% is holding me back. It’s been sucking my motivation. It’s been keeping me from moving forward. So, on December 1st, I’m going to send it out into the world and see what happens. I will finish that last 5%, but I won’t let the fact that it’s not done yet stop me from querying. Because, although I know they say not to send out a novel until it’s as good as you can make it on your own, the tiny sliver of change that I can make myself is insignificant.

So December 1st, I’m sending out my first batch of queries. And if it gets accepted, I’ll have a funny story about how I started querying my NaNoWriMo novel on December 1st, which is something agents say never to do. They generally mean don’t send out the NaNoWriMo novel you just finished though, not the NaNoWriMo novel you started two years ago and have already edited it so much that–even though you love it–you want to move on to the next stage.

Life:

Not much is going on over here. It’s the same nearly every week. Sunday: church, then start getting ready for Tuesday’s Spanish and German classes. Monday: teach my boy school and finish preparing for Tuesday’s classes. Wednesday through Friday: recover from teaching language classes and teach my boy. Saturday: maybe do something different?

My dh and I went for a drive at the beginning of the month to go see the falling leaves; that was different. Then we went to Kansas because we’ve never been there before. I want to go somewhere new every month, because we’ve been here in Colorado for about six years and haven’t seen much yet. For November, I want to see the Denver Art Museum. Since dh doesn’t want to go to the art museum (I really don’t want to go with him and have him rush me anyway), we’ll also go on a drive somewhere nearby.

I don’t celebrate Halloween, but I started playing Animal Crossing and I went to an Animal Crossing Halloween party with my daughter. The characters were so adorable! My boy went trick-or-treating and dressed up as a plague doctor. I want to wear the plague mask to Walmart sometime. I took my mask today but chickened out. I’ll do it when I’m only going in for a couple things.

So that was October. Hopefully if you’re doing NaNoWriMo, you’ll get what you want out of it. I’m not holding my breath for the elections, but hopefully by the time I write my wrap-up of next month, we won’t be in the middle of a civil war and people are killing each other.