My Life

I'm not sure whether blogging about my goals for the year have made me stick to them any better, but things are definitely happening for me.
My goals for this year began as:

• Graduate from college. (Accomplished)
• Write a new manuscript, something I haven't had time to do since I started college.
• Take a vacation someplace out of Arizona. (Accomplished)
• Hug my daughter every day.
• Learn how to make book trailers and post them to YouTube. (Deferred Indefinitely)

As I continue through the year, my goals now read:

• Write a new manuscript, something I haven't had time to so since I started college.
• Hug my daughter every day.
• Finish editing The Siege of Kwennjurat and get it published.
• Support my daughter as she takes her turn at college.

The new manuscript, Crown of Tears, was started this morning. As I like to write over my outline, the combined word count for the outline and manuscript already exceeds 2,000 words. My office is hung with ten maps for Crown of Tears, and one for The Siege of Kwennjurat. My daughter says it looks like a copy of "National Geographic" blew up. She wants to edge all my maps with yellow.

The daily hugs have gone a long way to defusing tension between my teen daughter and myself. I'm about two-thirds of the way through The Siege of Kwennjurat, and still plan to release it this fall. 

My sweet daughter starts school in about three weeks. We're going shopping for textbooks and school supplies next week.

I'm 3/4 of the way through knitting a pair of socks. My arthritis is now moving into my hands and wrists, making it more difficult for me to write and do my handcrafting. This is a very sad thing for me. I've ordered dictation software to handle the writing challenge, but I'm still looking for an app that will create hand-knit items for me. I don't think I'm going to find one. In July I read 25 books, for 4696 pages. In May 2011 I started the complete works of Mark Twain, which is about 6,500 pages and includes his essays and letters as well as all of his works of fiction. I just passed the 5,000 page mark, and am getting excited about finishing up. It's been a fascinating ride, and I now understand why people say the man is so funny.

~Marie