NaNoWriMo Follow-Up

Winner-2014-Twitter-ProfileWell, that month went a little differently than I’d planned, but NaNo tends to do that. I am going to call it a smashing success. My final word count is 80885. That means about 40 hours of genealogy organizing. I’m probably a little closer to 50. I certainly didn’t always stop when I hit the hour mark, I sometimes started an hour but didn’t finish so it didn’t count, and I did some other shorter bursts of work that didn’t get counted.

I finished off most of the documents sitting around on my computer, but there are still a few more to go. I am currently churning through emails. I have found some emails that did not get used as sources which I’ve had to add, and I’m being more consistent with the way the others are presented, so I’m going through every single one of them.

Email organizing highlights: I found an email from a cousin asking if we’re related — I had no idea back then but I know now. Others asking about a unique surname, I’m sure they will be related to me when I finish the records for that branch of the family too.

I continued to do some research as I went, finding some records online and scanning others from the FHL. I still have a list of things to scan from film, which of course will lead to doing a little more research. I never got carried away with it this month like I can do, following up on every lead, so that was good.

I did not get to my family newsletters at all. To do those, I need to finish sorting the emails and the Facebook posts, because that’s where the recent news comes from. Since I’m in the middle of one of those, clearly I couldn’t work on this.

I did not do much blogging. I worked on two posts that were already mostly written, but I never came back to finish them up and post them.

I did not do much on my short story writing. For write-ins, I intended to write some fan fic about minions. I wrote two. I wasn’t thinking about it enough to come up with any other story ideas, so I was at a loss for what to do at write-ins. (I wonder if the movie trailer interrupted my train of thought — my stories depended more on an entirely different origin story that was mentioned in a mini movie.) I did some translating once, attended a genealogy webinar during one, but mostly just goofed off.

But even with all the things I did not do, I still did an awful lot. So now, without the support of NaNoWriMo, I need to continue what I’ve been doing and try to get a lot more finished. I won’t need to work in solid hour blocks anymore for my word count, so I may do smaller bits more often. I’m on a roll and I’m feeling really good about how much I’m getting done.

And then soon, hopefully by next year, I can get back to working on projects I haven’t even started. Like my Feldstein one name study. Or the Mularzewicz one name study — in this case, I believe they’re all my relatives. Or going through the Polish Catholic records in search of earlier records about my people. And don’t forget returning to Europe for even more. And getting another project off the ground which has been patiently waiting for my programming attention to get it finished.

I think I’ll get a little more organizing done now before the Last Chance Write-In tonight. Will I add it to my word count? Possibly.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *