Caturday

Next Saturday will be a whole new year. It’ll probably take me ’til March to stop writing 2021. 😉 I don’t celebrate New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day. They don’t feel like, “holidays” to me, not in the traditional sense of the word, and I realized yesterday that they never have. Do you feel especially celebratory at the end of a year?

Cat used to be like this for the first ten months I had her. I swear, she’d wait until I wasn’t expecting it and just tear me to shreds. She is feeling more playful these days (and she’s eight years old, so that helps.), so she’ll smack my feet or swat at my socks, or she’ll snap her teeth at me. She’s feisty. She will bite me, on occasion, but she’s mostly obsessed with how many hair ties she can thieve. Also, sometimes my socks go missing in the middle of the night. 😉 I guess they offend her or she thinks they’re for her. I’m pretty sure she has dibs on anything soft and fluffy the second I keel over.

As I reflect, very lightly, on this year, I have to factor in that I’ve written over close to one million words on three different manuscripts. That, in and of itself, is quite the achievement. Yet, it barely registers. I’ve been told I’m too humble. Perhaps that’s true. As someone told me nearly two weeks ago, “Anyone can write, but you’re a talented writer.” I’m also not good with compliments.

If the software I used didn’t have a word counter at the bottom of the screen, I’d keep writing until something felt done. It’s a good process. However, I’ve spent the past fifteen years, perhaps longer, obsessing over word count when I am writing something, however large or small. Here, I don’t count words, but WordPress is happy to tell me at the end of each year how many words I’ve written. There have been years I’ve done a quarter of a million words here alone, sometimes more. That’s pretty good considering this material is free. 😉

Today was a grey, rainy, foggy, icy, frigidly cold day. There was so much black ice that many people fell and injured themselves. 😦 My hands and feet are like mini ice sculptures; frozen solid. But it was a good day in the sense that it was predominantly quiet. I was able to get closer to my Goodreads challenge number, as well. I’m currently at one hundred and fifty-sex books read for the year. My goal was one hundred and fifty-three. I just started reading book one hundred and fifty-seven. I might read one hundred and sixty if I stay on point between now and the 31st. Wish me luck with this one. I have to say, the material is compelling or I’d have to force myself to read it, and forcing myself to read shitty material is never a positive experience. To think I did eighty books last year when we were basically under hardcore quarantine for so long. I actually picked up a book Friday afternoon, but I will put it towards for 2022 challenge. If you aren’t a Goodreads member, it is free to join, you can link your Amazon Kindle account, they have tons of giveaways for free books throughout the year, and it’s a nice community. I’ve been a member since 2008, when a friend highly recommended I join. I ended up loving it far more than she did. I have Librarian status, so if you want or need your work added to the database, please get in touch. It’s an excellent networking took for writers.

A big part of me is glad that today is over. I haven’t slept in over forty-eight hours, so I need a good night’s sleep and to go back to being caffeine free (Damn you, Earl Grey tea!!). Tomorrow I’m planning to cook a nice Sunday dinner (Tradition.), and possibly bake either a chocolate mint cake or two dozen peppermint chocolate chip cookies, I can’t decide which to do first, but plan on doing both between this weekend and next weekend. After mid-January, it’s time to go back to eating super healthy again 90% of the time. I ate a ridiculous amount of chocolate before, during, and after Chanukah. I regret about 35% of it. 😉

On this final Caturday of the year, I hope you will make friends with strange cats next year, adopt and not shop for any animal you are looking to bring into your family, and most importantly, I hope you’re granted good health. Many of you don’t know what it’s like to be flaring when you have medication in your system which is supposed to be eliminating all of your pain, whereas a great amount of you do know what this is like. Hell. I’ve been functioning at a very low setting this year, and I’m fighting for a new diagnosis next year. New symptoms have to be addressed, and the sad thing is, bad things could be happening within my system while I wait to be seen by a myriad of doctors. I don’t look forward to additional suffering. Healthcare in this country is shameful. I’ll probably say it more than I care to, but it’s true, and it’s WRONG.

Bright Blessings, lovelies.