The last week has been a wasteland of productivity with many other things intervening. School, appointments, ambulance rides. Yeah, not a great week.

Jacob checked in tonight on his book, Draconic Earth, finishing a chapter and starting a new one. Some of it is foreshadowing major pieces for his eventual conclusion. About 400 words in total.

Andrea is still working on her “cancer journey” story, suitable for future blogging installments but for now, she is writing without editing as she goes. About 2700 words in total.

I did a few blogs in the last week, but not much new writing. I also received some really great feedback from a beta reader on my updated HR guide, Chapter 2 (Understanding yourself), and it took a while to get everything incorporated, updated and saved. It’s mostly camera ready, I think at this point. 3475 “final” words added to the book, bringing the edited total to 7962. That’s a little under 10%, I think. But I’m happy with the progress considering everything else going on in the last week.

Onward!

We’ve all had other stuff going on the last few days, so our word count was a bit lower in there. Tonight we re-engaged, with different pieces:

a. Andrea is working on a blog about her cancer experience over the last while, which will eventually show up on my blog here somewhere, probably a series of shorter posts in the end. But she added 3700 words tonight.

b. Jacob struggled a bit, which isn’t surprising, but he managed 170 words. He’s been tired the last few nights and had some challenges with his computer earlier this week. Funny story in there actually…we went to the local computer shop, thinking we might go for a full new gaming rig, but it would have been a desktop instead of a laptop to keep the cost down. So he would have lost his mobility factor when he goes to Peterborough or the cottage. Just to be “sure” about options, I took his laptop with us in case there were other config things we could do. Most of the time, they’re backed up in service, you have to leave equipment and they’ll call you, nothing unusual about that though. Instead, they were perfectly happy to open it up on the spot, not forcing me to wait in the bench queue, to see what internal upgrades were possible on the existing chassis.… Read the rest

Tonight, Andrea added another 450 words to her ToastMasters speech.

Jacob hit a groove and was closer to 500 words (double his normal output) on his book — which he has agreed I can say has a work-in-progress title of “Draconic Earth” (which I love by the way).

I continued to work on the blog post of the Q&A at Health Canada, polishing the first 4K words that I had already written, and adding another 2500 or so. I haven’t gone back to my main HR guide as I’m trying to get the blog done and I’m hoping my beta reviewer will give me feedback on the first big chapter too (of the HR guide). But once I’m done the Q&A — I’m about 80% done for the big questions, mostly flourishes left — I’ll go back to the Guide.

In the meantime? Onward!

So the “national novel writing in a month” writing challenge has begun, as it does every November. The goal is to write basically 50K words or the approximate length of a basic fiction novel. Our whole family is doing stuff this year, although none of us are really targeting the same wordlength as the “challenge”.

Last year, I worked on my HR Guide and easily made it. This year? I’m hoping to actually edit and finalize the damn thing. I thought I would be done way earlier in 2022, but life intervened, and now I’m targeting January 1st for my release. Fingers crossed.

For DAY ONE, I edited the introduction and moved everything into a simple WORD document, ditching Scrivener. Nice tool but learning the tool was getting in the way of simply flowing. I edited 7500 words into final form tonight, that’s not nothing, and I organized everything else out the wazoo, so I’m pretty happy about that aspect at least. The Intro to the HR Guide is at

Jacob is continuing with his book that he started last year, adding another 180 words to it tonight.

And Andrea is doing a mini-assignment each week, starting this week with a speech for ToastMasters.… Read the rest