July 2023 Recap

July was a month where once again, my ambition got the better of me, and I didn’t complete half the things that were on my list. Some I did out of a necessity of time, others, I just gave up halfway through the month. In July, I wanted to try and participate in Camp NaNoWriMo, and write 30,000 words in a new book. I wanted to lose some weight, and I wanted to get packed and moved.

Hold on, cause here comes the crazy parts. We did move, last weekend, into a new townhouse, where we have offices and an actual kitchen with cabinet space and a garage! It’s been a crazy week, which started with the A/C not working (in Texas, in July, of all places).

It’s fixed now, thank goodness, so we’re all nice and cool to start August. As long as we don’t go outside.

But that means it’s back to work.

G O A L O N E: Write the 1st draft of a new stand alone novel.

My good, better, best goals for this: 70,000 words/80,000 words/90,000 words

I’m 12,000 words into this. Not as much as I was hoping for the first month, but life has been busy. I’m going to focus hard on making this a priority for the month of August. But I’ll talk about that later this week. For July, it went well for the first week and a half. It felt good for that week to have all these words flow through me.

G O A L T W O: Focus on Tiktok to promote my books, because I seem to get better reach there than anywhere else. Tiktok has a benchmark of 1,000 followers before you can do things like links in your bio or go live, so that’s my ultimate goal.

Good, better, best: 200 followers/500 followers/1,000 followers

I’m currently at 157 followers on Tiktok, but again, I kind of fell off the wagon in the middle of the move. It’s so hard for me to balance being an author with everything else lately. Actually no, not even lately, just all the time.

G O A L T H R E E: Focus on improving my self care and work toward an average of 70 for a daily score. I set up a way to calculate my daily score in Notion, and my goal is to average 70. That includes things like spending time with my boyfriend, in a meaningful way, having a big creative breakthrough, or tidying up, because I’m terrible at that.

Lol, I have no idea what my current average is. I need to be better about that, too. I’ll talk about this more in my August outlook later this week, but with the move over and a new work schedule, I’m trying to buckle down and take advantage of the extra time I might have in the mornings to build new habits, like exercising again. I guess we’ll see what happens.