Hello December, you last month of the decade you!

Oh boy, November flew by. So fast, indeed, that I almost allowed myself to forget about failing at Nanowrimo… almost. But we’re moving forward into December!

Alas, what with winterizing and moving out of the RV, moving into our new apartment, a trip to Austin, family in town for Thanksgiving, and my ever-persistent self-sabotage and lack of discipline, I did not win Nanowrimo this year. Not even close. A far cry from 50k with my 10,808 words, but hey, those are ten thousand words I wouldn’t have otherwise. And, I’ve finally decided on my first writing project, after changing up my plan and outline about 13 times over the course of the week and a half I was actually really trying for Nanowrimo — I’m committing to writing a memoir about the RV.

I figure that I’ve heard it said by writers before, and maybe after attempting to do otherwise I’ll now accept it as true for myself too:

Write about yourself before you attempt to write about others’ stories.

At the very least, once I’ve completed this undertaking, I’ll have a ready-made copy of a hugely significant era of my and Reid’s relationship story on-hand should either one of us ever get amnesia like in The Notebook. Then, I either decide to publish it as a memoir or embellish/fictionalize certain things to sell it as creative nonfiction for my first venture into self-publishing to (also at least) learn the process! At best, whatever I decide to turn our RV adventure story into becomes a wildly successful bestselling book and then I can be a stay-at-home-mom with the earnings while I leisurely decide what to write next! xD

Also, I hesitate to commit to a minimum word count for each day for the rest of this year just yet, because I think I totally rebelled from that pressure in November. But, the goals I will commit to for this month to start with just three simple habits to build from are as follows —

Goals for December

1. Every morning when I wake up, write down my dreams for some instant short story practice and some immediate sense of accomplishment for having something written within the first hour of the day. When appropriate, share these stories as a new blog series, “Danielle’s Dreams”. 🙂
2. Brush Lincoln every day so he hopefully gets more used to it through regular repetition, and so that more hairs come out in the brush and less all over our new apartment.
3. Blog every workday, and at some point this month launch a business Instagram for @daniellegarciawrites. So I can start building a community for sharing my writing. No promises as to what this post will be each day. (Sometimes it will be just selections from my diary, sometimes notes from a writing course I’m taking, sometimes maybe even just a short sentence saying, “I’m keeping the promises to myself and here is my post for today.”) But, I WILL finally teach myself that I can rely on my own self-regulation to get things done.

Now for tomorrow, I’m off to go look through the pictures Reid has of our journeys. I’ll brainstorm all the scenes I want to include and outline scene cards in December! I can still use the 3-act story structure even if it’s a memoir and not a novel, right? 😉