For those of you not in the Denver Metro area, it's been incredibly rainy the last few days--perfect weather for curling up with a cup of tea and writing. 

Today is also the last day of Camp NaNoWriMo. I originally set out with a goal of 35,000 words (8 short stories at about 5,000 words each, with room for some shorter ones), but wound up lowering my goal by 10k in the first few weeks of the month for various reasons. As of writing this post, I have about 20,500 words across pieces of five short stories, two personal poems, and several chapters of a novel. Pretty dang sure I'm not going to whip up another 4,500 words today, but I'm okay with that. 

The point of doing a challenge like NaNoWriMo is just getting writing--telling the inner editor to take a long walk off a short pier and getting words on the page. And I'd like to think that's what I've managed to do so far this month. 

I started seriously working on the novel that's been percolating through my brain as I worked on other things, and I'm so pleased with that fact. This novel may or may not ever actually see the light of day, but I'm really enjoying writing it and, as I've said multiple times with friends recently, any writing is useful writing. 

So, here's a toast to writing 'the book of your soul' and writing bad short stories. Here's to getting the words on the page, no matter what they are. 

I've been trying to post here for over a month now, but life and my own insecurities have held me back. Seriously, I'm so afraid of having nothing to say and writing a boring post that I don't write one at all. 

Which, when it comes down to it, is dumb. I'm sure I have a lot to say--I just need to dig it up from under all the crap my conscious mind likes to pile on it. I'm a writer, for goodness sake. I should have something to write about! 

I suppose I could wax poetic about how awesome it is to be part of the Beyond the Trope podcast. Or I could muse about the fact that my first published short story is coming out soon. Or I could gush about how fantastic Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers is. 

But I think I've covered all of those pretty well in previous blog posts (and, really, they're recurring themes, so I need other things to post about, too). 

I guess it really boils down to an inferiority complex on my part: I'm a tiny little nobody in a big online ocean, shouting into the wind, so it feels like my voice doesn't really matter. 

Of course, there's another part of me that wants to just smack those thoughts right out of my head. Every voice matters, even my tiny, uncertain one.