Well, this is my last piece for the November writing challenge… what a month! I think I’ll use this opportunity to do a little recap and reflection.

Overall, I am happy with how this month went. I did a lot more writing than I’ve done in quite a while! After this post goes up, I will have posted 29 pieces of writing on my blog for this month – I only missed one day, over Thanksgiving week when I was with my family. And that is just fine, because it delights me to choose not to care about being perfect 🙂 In addition to just the volume of writing, I’d say some highlights of the month were taming my inner perfectionist a little bit, confronting my inner procrastinator, exploring and expressing the beginnings of some ideas that feel important to me, being in a better creative flow than usual, actually participating more in the social media space vs. passively consuming… all good stuff!

One of the bigger challenges of this month was just how big of a time commitment this was. I had to restructure my days to accommodate my writing. Sometimes – more often than not – I ended up staying up later than I would have to finish my writing. So my sleep schedule became a little disorganized, and I fell off the boat on consistent early morning exercise.

The flip side of that was that it forced me to prioritize my time, and I found that a lot of the time writing is something I feel very good about prioritizing. This became more true as the month went on, as my thoughts became more interesting to me, and the ideas that were coming through in my writing started connecting together in interesting ways. I was reminded how much I love processing life through writing, how good it is for me to write.

When people have been asking what I’ve been up to lately, I’ve felt very happy to share that I’ve been focusing on my writing. That feels like a good sign to me, for any endeavor. I honestly am happy and satisfied to be doing this.

Now that it’s ending… what comes next? That’s the open question I have posed to myself, and I don’t quite know what the answer is. I want to keep the momentum going, but want to shift my focus a little bit. Like, maybe I’ll focus less on volume and more on engagement with others. Or maybe I’ll spend time writing every day but not put the pressure on to publish every day. Maybe I should just try to keep it up and see what happens? It’s getting easier, sort of? I do have a little writing group that will hold me accountable to at least a piece of writing a week, so I don’t think I’ll fall off completely.

To anyone who’s been following along, or has dropped in for some of this month’s content… first, thank you so much for reading! It really means so much to me. Second, I’d love to hear your thoughts, reactions, feedback, requests…? What struck you? What triggered feeling in you? What do you want to see more of?

With love, til next time,

Emma