For those who celebrate, I hope that you have a lovely holiday, as stress-free as possible.

For those who don’t, I hope you’ve had a good week!

Me – it’s been a week of ups and downs. My period started, which wasn’t completely unexpected. No where near a 28 day cycle – happened 45 days after the last period. The first day was a pretty Meh day that sort of reached Bad status, looking back at it. Plus, on the second day I had general stress that eventually morphed into actual anxiety. So not the best week in terms of health. Not too many good days this week, if any.

However, Thanksgiving was lovely and I have a tremendous amount to be thankful for. I spatchcocked a chicken, which may now turn out to be my favorite way of cooking chicken. It was so moist! I don’t generally like white meat because I find it dry. This wasn’t. Yum.

We also had wild rice (a taste from my childhood), cranberry orange (another taste from my childhood), roasted root veggies, rolls (that turned out better this time) as well as both pumpkin pie and pecan pie.

Did I over eat? Oh hell yes. Have I already started cutting back, as well as going to the gym? Yup. I figure I might even get away with a wash in terms of weight for the week.

I’ve been writing a series of short stories for the past week. It’s been fun. Today, I went and looked at writing numbers for the year.

I will “Nano” this month, that is, write over 50K words. If I assume that I will nano again in Dec, that means that, not counting marathons, I will have written over 50K seven months this year. Plus the two writing marathons brings that up to nine months of over 50K. There were three months when I didn’t nano, though I was over 40K for those three months. Two of those months were due to the Anthology workshop. The other month was September, when we had so much travel, and I had some really bad health issues.

If I manage 50K for December, that means I’ll hit 706K for the year. It will be the best I’ve ever done in terms of word count. I think that next year, though, I’ll just aim for 700K. Will possibly do more than that, but if I can average 50K a month, that will be awesome.

How close are you getting to your annual goals? What are you thinking about for next year’s goals?