First Draft Completed: Check

Friends! Readers! I’m so pleased to tell you all that I have successfully finished the first draft of my branching narrative/choose your own adventure style detective novel: Carter and Carter Detective Agency. I have also successfully achieved the goal I set for myself for NaNoWriMo this year: 30,000 words.

Awkwardly, I finished the first draft on 28 November, and therefore had to start a whole new project for the last two days, but I pulled out one of the story ideas from the notes section in my phone and put down a couple of thousand words. In the last month I have written a little over 31k words, which is a pretty good achievement, even if it’s not the standard NaNoWriMo goal of 50k. They don’t technically call it winning unless you do the full 50k but I’m calling it winning.

I went onto the NaNoWriMo website to look for merch, in case I needed to buy myself a congratulatory gift, and I realised it was their 25th anniversary! Not only that, but I had been participating almost half that time; this year was my twelfth year. I can’t believe I’ve done this for that long, but it seems to be working for me. I’ve also developed good writing routines for months other than November.

In addition to finishing my first draft, and achieving my monthly writing goal, I went out today for lunch with some of my fellow writers from the Romance Writers of Australia, you can see us all below at Young and Jackson’s in Melbourne:

Coming up to Christmas and New Years, I expect I won’t be able to do as much writing, with all the social gatherings and other stuff that needs to be done in December, but that’s okay. It’s also possible that my day job will really start ramping up in December, but that remains to be confirmed. Fun times.

I’ve started making my Christmas gifts, I decided that handmade was the way to go this year, and I’ve started to reflect on my goals for 2024, and what I might set as my goals for 2025. Have you started planning your new year’s goals or resolutions? I’d love to hear about them.

I hope all your catch ups leading up to Christmas are pleasant and invigorating, and that your family are kind. I know it can be a rough time for some people, so if that’s the case for you, try to take it easy on yourself.