Winning, Recovery and Other Odds & Ends

…or, “Where the *@%! Has Jean Been?!”

November was a heck of a month, y’all. As if NaNoWriMo wasn’t enough to keep me busy, about a week and a half into that my freelance business started to pick back up, and before I knew it I had more clients and projects than I knew what to do with. Not that I’m complaining. And then I got sick with the creeping crud, that annoying sickness that isn’t bad enough to give you a good excuse to curl up in bed and do nothing for a couple of days, but just bad enough to slow you down and make you miserable. I actually went about a week without writing anything for NaNoWriMo, because it was all I could do to keep up with my freelance workload before I ran out of steam and had to go fall into a Nyquil coma to get ready to do it all again the next day.

Which meant that I got to spend the last week of November writing my butt off. I almost didn’t bother. I came really close to dropping out of the race after that week I spent not writing. After all, by this point I had already finished my novel, and I still had another 25,000 words to go, and there it was Thanksgiving already. But CreateSpace would be giving the winners five free copies of their novels on top of a free proof, and I kept thinking of all of the promotions I could afford to do with five free paperback copies of Dominion at my disposal, and that was a big enough carrot to get me moving again. So somehow I managed to write another 25,000 words between Thanksgiving and November 30th and pull off a win. Don’t ask me how I did it because I don’t even know.

And yes, you read that right — I FINISHED Dominion of the Damned! Now I’m going to take the month of December off to let my brain recover and recharge while my husband and my BFF both give it a first read, then I’ll commence revisions in January. Allowing time for beta readers to read the second draft and another pass to fix any issues they come up with and take care of formatting, I’m hoping to have it available by March.

In the last few days since finishing Nano, I’ve been working on client projects and trying to catch up on sleep. My only big non-work-related goal right now is to clean my house and decorate it for Christmas. And continue catching up on sleep, because I’m not there yet.

How was your November? If you were doing NaNo, did you win? And how was your Thanksgiving?