If I count blog posts, book reviews, a thing I wrote to a friend, AND story words, I easily broke 2000 words yesterday. If I just count story words, it was more like 200. Eep.

But I had a ridiculously nice day and that counts for something, too. I had a very productive morning, a great yoga class, bought veggies at the farmer’s market, went grocery shopping, made chicken soup, read a JD Robb, had a lovely time swimming and playing with the dogs — with the thought that it was only going to be sunny for twenty minutes so I HAD to take advantage even though I needed to write, but then when it stayed sunny, I stayed swimming… Yeah. It was a little summer vacation day in November. And bad me that I didn’t get much story writing done, but good me that I took the opportunity to savor the moment.

Of course, if I don’t stop savoring moments, I’m going to wind up broke and homeless and hungry and it will be hard to savor that, but I’m not going to bother with regrets or worry today. Not when I could be spending my time more productively.

I think there was more I was going to write about — maybe my indecision about posting book reviews to Goodreads? I’m going through a little internal debate about whether I want to keep my book reviews with my blog and/or create a book review blog, because I’m not sure I want them to be as public as they are on Goodreads. Not that a blog’s not public, but I write my book reviews mostly so I can remember what I thought about a book and so that I can keep track of my reading, not because I think they’re useful for other people. But as I discovered last year, in the year of many blogs, it’s sort of a pain to have a lot of blogs — I wind up not writing anywhere and getting topics mixed up and feeling like it’s more effort than it’s worth. I think I use Goodreads mostly because it’s so easy to find the book name and information. In other words, because I’m lazy. Anyway, I’ve got a mental debate going on with that. Oh, yeah, and some people think authors aren’t supposed to write book reviews, which is sort of a problem, too. Or at least it adds to the mental debate.

Regardless, yesterday I wrote three or four book reviews on Goodreads, instead of working on my own story, which was probably not the best use of my time, but I wanted to remember that I’d read those books and yes, I would have forgotten. It put my total of books read and recorded on Goodreads over 100 for the year, which I found somehow oddly gratifying. It reminded me of 6th grade, when we got popcorn parties when the class as a whole read 500 books, which was the only time in my childhood when my peers seemed to approve of my reading. I won’t give myself a popcorn party, though, since popcorn is definitely not on my approved foods list.

I got the feedback from the sessions I did at FWA yesterday. Despite the number of presentations I’ve given in my life, it was the first time I’ve gotten feedback from the official feedback type forms, which was kind of cool. Ahead of time, I suspected that feedback would be a lot like reviews — you can’t please all the people all the time, your mileage may vary, take them with a grain of salt, etc. But I was surprised at how touched I was by the nice comments. I think it was because I was using my real name. They just felt much more personal then reviews do. It made me think that I’d like to publish a book under my real name someday, but then I realized that meaner comments would also feel more personal so maybe not.

And somehow I have wasted far more time than I intended to thinking about Goodreads and FWA evaluations so its time to move on. Today’s goal: words, words, words, of course. But this time, story words, I hope!