Four Things to Celebrate From My Day

 

When I made the decision to stop doing the celebration blog posts every day, I mentioned that I’ll still do one every once in a while. Today is definitely the right occasion to write a celebrations blog post. I have four things to celebrate from today!

 

There are some goals I set for myself this year and today, I completed the first step in making two of those goals a reality.

 

One goal that I have is to write an ebook for every month of the year. I got the idea for this challenge from another writer who was able to do that very thing. Not only did she write an ebook every month of the year, but she also self-published them for that particular month of the year! I thought that was pretty awesome and quite an amazing challenge to take on. I kept thinking I would like to do this challenge someday, too.

 

Well, 2022 became the year I am doing that challenge! Right now, I am still unemployed, so I do have the time to write these ebooks in one week. I hope to be working again next year, but until then, I am getting as much writing done as possible!

 

I have scheduled these tasks among the 4 weeks of the month:

 

Week One: Write the ebook. Go over the first draft and revise where needed during the weekend.

 

Week Two: The ebook is out for edits.

 

Week Three: Finalize manuscript and prep for publication. (I will be using Kindle Unlimited.)

 

Week Four: Publish.

 

I started writing the January ebook on January 2^nd. I didn’t want to do any book work on January 1^st; my kids were home, everything was closed, and there were no plans for the day. So I set that day aside as a Family Day and just enjoyed family time. I got to work on the ebook on January 2^nd and today, January 8^th, I have finished writing the first draft! YAY!!!

 

I kept progress of my word counts written for the day as I worked on this ebook:

 

Day One: 2300 words

Day Two: 2808 words

Day Three: 2178 words

Day Four: 2048 words

Day Five: 2288 words

Day Six: 2694 words

Day Seven: 1154 words

 

Total word count for this 65-page ebook is 16886 words. (I did not include things like links and book titles or citations in my word counts.)

 

I am really happy I finished writing this ebook. WOO-HOO! I am just thrilled. It WAS a lot of work to get it done in one week, though. Seriously. I was either writing, driving my kids around, reading, eating or sleeping. It’s a miracle I still found time to read the news and be on social media! I fell behind on chores, on my other WIPs and also on my workouts. But I have decided that if things get too crazy on the one week I spend writing the first drafts of the ebooks, I’ll step away from some of those things just so I can keep up with the other things (like my workouts!). Hey, it’s just for one week! I’ll get back to everything else after I am done.

 

So, yes, I’ll definitely be MIA for the first week of every month this year. I am determined to achieve this goal!!

 

The second goal that I got started on accomplishing is my plan to keep track of all books I read during 2022. I did this one year with the goal of reading 100 books in one year. But this time, there is no magical number for me to reach. I’ll just list the books and I will see how many I manage to read by year’s end. The number of books is not important; just that I list them all!

 

Today, I finished reading the first book to add to that list: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s a good book!! Yes, I have never read it, until now. I almost didn’t finish reading it! My oldest read it a long time ago and I told him I wasn’t sure if I wanted to keep reading the book, because it was “incredibly boring.” He shrugged his shoulders and said, “I liked it.” So I decided to keep reading it, and I’m glad I did! It got better. Really. The story was very good and I was in tears at the end. Fitzgerald was such an amazing writer. The man really knew how to write description! And his voice was almost poetic. I got to a point where his tone just drew me into the story.

 

I was so stoked by these two things to celebrate from today that I took a “celebration walk” with the dog. (Pictured) This particular walk was longer than our normal walks. Today’s weather was just beautiful. The weather was mild and we even had a little bit of sunshine! A nice break from all the rainy days we had been dealing with all week. And today’s beautiful weather was something else to celebrate too.