Plans

2016 Wrap Up/2017 Goals

~ Cheyenne Raphael ~ 6 Comments

To continue with the theme of scatter-brained posts, I had goals for 2016 to wrap up, but I don’t have them anymore. They were on my MacBook which had to be wiped because of a malware invasion, and apparently the file wasn’t in Dropbox… The fact that I don’t remember most of them is probably a good indication that I failed at most of them, but here’s what I do remember!

  1. I did NOT win my Goodreads challenge, and Goodreads feels the need to remind me of that fact every time I open the app…
  2. I won NaNoWriMo for the second year running!
  3. I finished the first draft of my first novel! insert terrified emoji here It’s a total complete mess, but I finished the thing!
  4. I learned lots of programming stuff that I am not going to get into here because you most likely don’t care, and I don’t wanna explain it… Ok so really that wasn’t an official goal for 2016 until two weeks ago, but I made it my goal over Christmas break, and I accomplished it, so I’m counting it!
  5. Added together, all the writing projects I’ve completed in 2016 total up to 111911 words! I’m pretty sure my goal was 100000, so I’m proud of that!

Goals for 2017:

  1. By June 1st, I hope to have my novel ready for beta readers. If it could be by March 1st, that would be fantastic, but school is probably going to crush that dream.
  2. I’m setting my Goodreads challenge for 30 books because I’m 90% sure I can meet that!
  3. I am going to attempt the A to Z reading challenge, which means I have to read a book starting with each letter of the alphabet. If you know of books starting with R, Q, X, Y, or Z, please leave them in the comments! Those are the only ones I haven’t found yet…
  4. For NaNoWriMo this year, I’m planning to write the second book in this series I have started. We’ll see if that actually happens because I may still be trying to sort out this mess of a thing I’m calling a novel if the unthinkable happens and I epically fail at my first goal.
  5. This is the thing that I really need to do, but don’t wanna do. I’m in the middle of learning Swift and Python, (which are both programming languages), and I have a ton of notes for both all over my phone, iPad, laptop, and two notebooks, and they’re gonna have to be combined and organized before I get much further into this. I was planning to do this over Christmas break, but I just added to the mess instead because I’m a nerd like that!

I feel like I should list my upcoming posts here, but I still have all those that got caught in drafts, and honestly the next couple posts are gonna be embarrassingly late stories for Short Story Society. How did you do on your 2016 goals, (writing or otherwise?) Got anything cool planned for this year? Are you planning to join The HP Writing Cup? Let’s chat in comments!

Happy NaNoWriMo!!! (Tips, Tricks, Panicking, and What to Expect From Me)

~ Cheyenne Raphael ~ 5 Comments

Hey readers, writers, and Wrimos! It’s November 1st, aka the first day of the month long insanity known as National Novel Writing Month! Fun fact: NaNoWriMo began in 1999, which is the year I was born, and my birthday is November 18th, which means NaNoWriMo is just 18 days older than me! Look at me do math! I really hope that was right… 😂
So… Since it’s NaNoWriMo, and school has me going slightly insane already, I’m gonna have to rearrange my blogging schedule, (or lack there of), until all this calms down a bit. I’m also helping out with some assistive tech training this month, and I’m going to be traveling for doctor appointments in the near future, so here’s how this is gonna go down.

  1. I’m going to post weekly NaNo tips, (and updates on my progress assuming I get 5 minutes free.) Your NaNo tip for today is… Get WAY ahead on your word count while you’re still super excited about your idea! Trust me… You WILL be sick of your characters and story by the beginning of the third week in, and you will decide that the perfect fix to your plot problem is to drop a giant bolder on all your characters, watch them die in agony, and give them a beautiful funeral as a perfect happy ending to your story. Okay… Maybe that was a BIG exageration, but you get the picture, right??? Yes? Good!
  2. I’ve got some scheduled posts, but they’re kinda scattered randomly throughout the month because… Why would I bauther to put them in a set pattern? So expect some book reviews for books that I read like… six months ago or so.
  3. I’ll probably be doing lots of frantic word sprints, so come join me on Twitter please! I’ll either do my own or join @NaNoWordSprints, but come say hey either way @Cheyenne_writes!
  4. What posts I do write will most likely be written in the car, on my iPad, going through mountains for those doctor appointments I mentioned, so I’m sorry in advance for my typos and horrible grammar. It’ll drive me crazy when I reread things, and then I’ll end up updating everything.
  5. Wait for it… Wait for it… I HIT FIFTY FOLLOWERS!!!!!!! If you follow me on Twitter, you know I was hoping to make that by my birthday, and it actually happened! You guys are amazing, and thank you for reading all my rambling! I know you’re actually reading it because a lot of you like and comment. I like likes and comments! A lot! If you’re a Twitter friend, you also know that I had a writerly surprise planned, and that’s still gonna happen… Just not this month… It’ll probably be December because there is NO way I can keep it up this month, but school will let up a lot in December, so that should work out. Hint, hint: It’s Harry Potter related, and it involves people writing together. I would like to collaborate with a couple of bloggers for this, so drop me a line if you’re interested. Either DM me on Twitter or email me from my contact page. My only requirement is that you write and you blog!

Ok so that post was extremely rambling, but hopefully it was sort of coherent, and I will now sign off and return next week with a NaNo tip! Let me know in the comments how your first day of NaNo went! I’ve hit 1500, and I’m planning to make it to 1670 as soon as I publish this! Message me if you’d like more info on my project, and… I don’t actually know how to end this. Please don’t unfollow me because of this post, and remember to be bookish and stay writerly!
From Cheyenne 🙂