Well, I'm 39 years old today. I had lots of plans for this weekend including sitting on the couch reading, writing, eating awesome food at two dinners at fancy restaurants, and getting lots of sleep. Unfortunately, none of that happened. My babysitter cancelled on Friday night, my husband got the flu sometime during Friday night, everything got cancelled, and I got no sleep because I slept on the couch. This is another one of those birthdays where I have to tell myself, “At least I am alive with a roof over my head.” And so begins my 39th year on this planet… This may be the final year I stop trying to celebrate my birthday. For eight years running, some crazy illness, wintery weather, or just the stars aligning poorly have interfered with any kind of plans I've made. I know when to throw in the towel.

Onward!

You may have noticed things are a little different on the blog. I've changed over to a new template and so far I'm pretty happy with it. I wish it was a tad more flexible but I'm making do. It's a hell of a lot better than my old template that wouldn't allow me to move anything around on the backend because a plugin was interfering with drag & drop. I gleefully deleted that theme and all its plugins yesterday morning when I made the switch. There are a few things in this template I need to fix, plus I want to change the fonts, and make special pages for each of my books, but it's running smoothly enough to debut it!

What else happened this week…

I suffered a ton of shoulder pain this past week so my heating pad was my BFF.

I worked out FOUR times this week and each day included lifting weights which was really good for my shoulders actually.

I made it to the office and got a lot of writing done. In fact, let's get to the word count update!

Sunday Word Count Check-in!

Expected Word Count (Jan 17): 25,500
Total Word Count (Jan 17): 29,831

Still ahead of the game even after taking yesterday off from writing. I am up to 66k on the new book, and I bet I can finish it within a week while working on Nogiku Book 4 updates. I hope to get some words in today, but I'm not counting on it. I'll be sure to pick back up strong this coming week! Goal this week: stay ahead of the expected word count. Goal for this project: hit 80k and add in 5-10k on revisions.