Author: Michelle

NaNoWriMo Winner, Now What?

nanowrimo_2016_webbanner_winner

For those following along, the month of November was National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo for short. The goal was to write 50,000 in a month. It was to be a rough draft of something, not necessarily something ready for publication at the end of the month.

This was my fourth year participating, and while what I wrote this year was more a cathartic experiment than an actual story, I successfully wrote 50,814 words. It took shutting up my inner editor, who has a nasty habit of popping up at the most inconvenient times, and a lot of time spent in front of the computer, but I did it. What will become of those 50,000 words remains to be seen. But for now I can say, the experiment was a success and I’m back to working on my regular project that I hope to have done by spring.

Stay tuned, more to come on that later; once it’s made it past the second draft stage and I figure out how exactly to end the story.

Pass It On

This morning while shopping at my local grocery store, I encountered an employee who was the epitome of how we all should be acting these days. What he did wasn’t a grand display or over the top gesture that caught my attention, it was simply a “good morning” and a genuine smile that you could tell that it began from within him and radiated out to the world. That was it. We had no other interaction, other than my returning the smile and reply of “good morning” to him as well. But in that brief moment, it was a ray of sunshine, in a rather normal day of running mundane errands.

Such a simple thing changed my outlook for the day. I, in turn, greeted everyone else that I came in contact with in the store in that same manner. Expecting nothing in return, just passing along a simple greeting and a smile. And you know what, everyone I met, did the same.

Imagine what the world be like if we chose to practice such simple acts of kindness every day.