I think black flats are a fairly standard piece of a woman’s closet. At least, I need a pair. Or, you know, two.

In the past, I’ve just gotten some cheap flats from a certain unnamed box store and wore them until they looked crappy. That didn’t take long. They also weren’t exactly what I’d call comfortable, or supportive. I couldn’t really walk around a lot in them, or my back would start hurting. But I figure, hell, they’re cheap right? And for most of my life, cheap was what I could afford.

Recently, this company came to my attention called Tori Burch. They make these flats that are iconic. They’re also almost $230.00 for a pair of bloody black flats!

Here’s the thing, though, I’m probably going to save up and get me a pair. And do you know why?

Because sometimes you’ve got to do an upgrade. Sometimes you’ve got to stop making do with the cheapest you can afford and invest in something real and of quality.

Okay, I’m not telling you all this to sell you on these flats. I’m telling you this because I had a mental shift that was similar to my transition from cheap flats to Tori Bush flats.

I realized that I, like my shoes, need an upgrade.

And since we’re nearing the start of 2019, it’s a good time to figure out what needs an upgrade.

I need to upgrade my internal voice, and that’s really where we need to start. Too often I find myself shortchanging myself. I get tired and lazy and start settling for what’s cheap, fast and easy. In many, many ways. Before I can fully fix that behavior, I need to start by understanding that I’m worth the effort. I need to put the effort into taking care of me before I take care of others because if I don’t I can’t take care of others.

I need to upgrade my skin care. And I’m honestly a little embarrassed that I’m still working on this. I’m thirty-two now, and I need to start taking good care of my skin. I mean drinking enough water, using a gentle cleanser, and finding a moisturizer that works with my hella oily skin. I’ve started using rose water as a primer and setting spray. It’s doing some great things for my skin. I also started, gasp, using an under-eye cream to get rid of my bags and decrease wrinkles. Yes, I understand that I’m going to age. I’d like to age gracefully. I’d also like to at least look like I slept last night.

I need to upgrade my money mindset. For instance, I just learned this year that there was a difference between a 401K and a retirement plan. I’m learning tons about investing, and how it’s not as unreachable as I thought it was. I’m also learning that I need a savings plan. Can you believe I don’t have a savings account? I’ve got to fix that.

I need to upgrade my attitude towards my writing. I’ve gotten into sort of a rut with my writing, and I’m finding that a lot of business decisions I’ve made in the past are just not working for me anymore. If they ever worked at all. So I’m going to be making some major changes in my writing career in 2019, doing some scary things that I’ve been hesitating to do. More on that soon.

I need to upgrade my faith in myself, finally. I have kind of a track record of quitting on things that I’ve found hard. I’ve not taken good care of my health, not done the difficult things when the easier thing was an option. I want to know that I can do difficult things, and have faith that I can do more than I believe that I can.

So what about you. What’s your Tori Bush level upgrade in your life? Let us know in the comments below!

What better time of the year could there be for a Christmas story? Enjoy twelve little Christmas tales, ranging from heart felt to horrifying. Meet a young man who recieves a surprise Christmas gift, a little boy who gets an unexpected visit from Santa, and a young woman spending Christmas Eve in a new coat.

Get it here now!

Nanowrimo is done now for another year. Lots of writers, like myself, are freaking exhausted this week because we just spent a month writing 50,000 words. My final word count was 50,016, which is actually not as much as some other writers I was buddies with. It’s okay, I’m not judging myself by other people.

Much.

This was the first time in three years that I’ve participated, and I was honestly a little unsure I was going to be able to do it.

Because it’s been so long since I’ve participated, I wanted to give you an overview of my experience. It wasn’t all great, but I’m absolutely glad I did it.

Here’s why.

What sucked hard

I rushed another project last month. To be specific, I rushed the end of another novel I was writing. It was supposed to be a novella. Actually, it started out as a short story and sort of blossomed from there. That’s the way of things, I suppose. But I’m not happy with the ending, and it’s going to need some major rewriting. I’m not really happy about how I left that.

Literally, nothing else got done this month. I did the bare minimum housework. I cooked the easiest things possible on my days to cook. My social media has been super lacking. I stopped doing Amazon ads altogether. I have the edits for Missing Stitches, and I’ve not worked on them nearly as much as I should have. I don’t think I sent out a single newsletter this month. I completely failed to do anything decent for Black Friday or Cyber Monday. I’ve let everything go in the pursuit of those 50,000 words. I’ll definitely be doing a lot more planning next year in October to get ready.

There were some days when I really had to push myself more than I’m comfortable with. Generally, I don’t spend hours writing in the evenings after I get home. But I spent a lot of nights doing that, only to go to bed late and get up early to write some more. That’s a schedule that I don’t intend to keep long term.

I scheduled a vacation and that was stupid! Honestly, the biggest problem I had with Nanowrimo this year was that I didn’t decide I was going to do it until about halfway through October. That meant that I was in no way prepared for this, and had already planned a four-day vacation to Erie! That meant that I needed to write way more every day than the normal 1,667 words.

My brain’s a little burned out right now. Again, I didn’t plan on doing this, which I think led to every one of my problems. If I had been smart, I would have written all my November blog posts in October, stocked up on oven meals, done a thorough cleaning job so I just needed to maintain, and not written a rough draft in September and October!

What was awesome

In an ideal month, I would have written 220 pages. Instead, I wrote 358 pages. And, I do mean, ideal. That’s based on me writing ten pages a day, taking one day off a week and not counting the days I was on vacation. To be honest, that probably wouldn’t have happened. There are plenty of days when I don’t get ten pages in, and I don’t usually play catch up. So I got significantly more done this month than I would have otherwise.

I was really excited to do this, and I’ve really wanted to do this for years now. I’ve missed doing Nano. And getting to do it this year was really great.

I met a lot of cool new writers, both online and in person. I can never have enough writing friends.

I free wrote a lot this month. Which is one of the reasons I approve of word counts like this. When I’m focusing on getting words on the page, I’m not thinking as much about what those words are. That sounds bad until you realize that’s exactly what freewriting is. It’s all about writing without ego, writing without forethought. Just, you know, writing. And when you’ve got pages and pages to do, you free write almost by necessity.

Normally my daily goal is ten pages when I’m writing a rough draft. Ten pages seem like nothing now. Like, after writing almost two thousand words a day, ten pages sounds like a freaking breeze. (Not having to stop and count words every five pages is also a delightful prospect.)

Finally, the real reason why I did Nanowrimo. I feel freaking fantastic because I accomplished something amazing! Something that people try every year and fail to do. Something that I can be really proud of. Yes, I’ve had books published, that’s not the point. The point is that we should always be striving to succeed in new things. We should always be setting new challenges for ourselves because we should always want to be better. But also, because it feels amazing to achieve new goals.

So what do you think? Did you participate this year? How did it go for you? Let us know in the comments below.

What better time of the year could there be for a Christmas story? Enjoy twelve little Christmas tales, ranging from heart felt to horrifying. Meet a young man who recieves a surprise Christmas gift, a little boy who gets an unexpected visit from Santa, and a young woman spending Christmas Eve in a new coat.

Get it here now.