Goals check for the week of January 7

Last week was a fairly productive week for my novel, with declining productivity everywhere else.  Much of this stuff isn't in my goals, but I started out very productive on Tuesday (my first "normal" day, since the kids I took care of were still out of school on Monday), but I started accomplishing fewer of the administrative tasks and other things on my to-do list throughout the week.  This week, therefore, I'll need to play some catch-up.

As for the goals, though, here we go:

1. Novels:  I continued making fantastic progress on the current novel I'm working on all throughout the week, until I got to Friday.  This is ironic, since it happens to be Friday evenings that I meet with my friends from NaNoWriMo -- we were members of a write-in from NaNo 2011, and we've just kept meeting ever since -- but we often have so much fun chatting that we don't actually do any writing except during NaNo or Camp NaNo (the summer session).  But the reason why is that I do most of my writing in the evenings, and that was when I was with my friends, so no writing got done that way.  Then I was preoccupied on Saturday and sick on Sunday, so I have yet to start back up again.  Fingers crossed that it will come today... though you might have to wait until next week's goal check to find out.

All in all, though, I'm not too bothered by the fact that I took a few days off.  I'd written for six days straight, adding more than 13k to my novel and averaging a little over 2k each day.  As long as I can get back to work today without a hitch, I think that's pretty good progress.

Also, I made a very good contact, a successful self-published author whom I talked to for about an hour and a half Friday morning.  He had lots of good advice for me, and seeing as how I'm planning on going the self-publishing/e-publishing route with my books, I suppose this counts somewhat toward my goal of making progress on my novels.

2. Website and blogs:  No progress yet, I'm afraid.

3. Other writing progress:  No progress yet.

4. Books:  I've been plowing through my reading list so that I can get to a point where I can read one of the books on my 2013 reading list.  I want to reread The Hobbit first (I like having books fresh in my mind when I go to see the movie), and then I'm going to tackle Les Miz.

5. Horses:  Not so good in this department last week, either.  I did manage to ride Panama Wednesday evening, but only him, despite the fact that I'd been planning to ride Rondo on my own for the first time before my next lesson.  I woke up feeling a little ill Thursday morning, too (a precursor to whatever took me out of commission yesterday, I'm guessing), so I didn't even make it out to the barn for my lesson -- my trainer rode Rondo without me.  I was feeling better by evening, and rode Panama again, so he got two rides last week -- but then our temperatures went down into the single digits and teens for the weekend, and I got sick, so I haven't seen the horses since I blanketed them Friday evening.  I am hoping I will feel up to riding both of them tomorrow, when it finally pops up above freezing for a little while.

So the week itself was a mixed bag -- for the most part, there was lots of success with my fiction goals, but not much anywhere else.  Hopefully this week will be better!