Sleep Deprivation and Exceeding Expectations

Hey Mom,

       I’ve had a few things going on these past few days. I wanted to write you yesterday morning but I’ll get to that. I’ve been working the past few nights and once I get home I usually don’t stay up long enough to do much of anything. This morning I got home and started getting settled down when I got a phone call from the babysitter…Sariah was sick. So I got up and got dressed.

       Sariah has vomited twice and was dry-heaving once everything was out of her stomach. Once I got her home her body was attempting to vomit about every 15 minutes or so. I got her to eat part of a popsicle and drink a few sips of water but none of that stayed down. She fell asleep beside me in my bed while watching one of her favorite TV shows. Once she woke up she was a little slow to get going but she came around and was back to her playful self by the time her sister got home from school. I didn’t sleep more than maybe 15 minutes.

       Another big thing I’ve been working on lately I did mention in my last post—theWriteClub YouTube channel. I’ve been putting together an introductory video for the group. There are six other people counting on me to get this done. I’m almost completely finished with it but I’m still waiting on some information from two of the other members which I need in order to introduce them in the video.

       NaNoWriMo is going to be starting in just a few days, November 1^st—my birthday. Maybe the doctor that made you wait another day so I wouldn’t be born on Halloween could see into the future and knew that I would be a writer and that an even called National Novel Writing Month would begin starting in 1998. I just attempted for the first time last year, and succeeded. Well, I more than succeeded last year—I met the 50,000 word goal by 168 percent. I wrote more than 84,000 words. There were nights when I wrote over 7,000 words. I didn’t really get too burnt out on writing. I was pretty charged and ready to go most every single day. I didn’t stop thinking about the book I was writing. I made notes on napkins while I was at work, in my car sitting in the parking lot in front of the hospital, and on my drives to and from work I was thinking about the story and how to make it interesting and how to pull things off.

       Some people might have stopped writing once they hit the 50,000 word goal and just said “I’m done! I did it!” But not me. I wanted to write for as long as I could. The book could have been longer if I’d had more time but I did stop writing at the 30 day mark. I’ve been working on revising in my spare time since then and I have a long way to go with it yet. There are some serious changes I need to make as I have thought of better ways to write certain scenes. I’ve taken out the entire beginning I’d written during NaNo last year and started with a bit more action.

       I had no real plot outlined last year. I had the story idea and I’d thought of some points I wanted to hit during the story but for the most part I was just winging it. This year I took a bit of a different approach and have outlined some of the chapters. It’s not a comprehensive outline by any means but it is a lot more than I had last year and I still have plenty room for flexing the story in whichever direction I think it needs to go in at various points.

       I hope things are going well for you. I need to get some things done now though. I’ll write you again later on. Love ya.