November Recap!

Happy  Thanksgiving! I hope you had a lovely one.  I have been neglectful of my blog, because I have been participating in my first NaNoWriMo!  One month, 50,000 words,  1667 new words  per day.  I was keeping up for the first couple of weeks, getting up at 5:30AM to try and put as many words down as possible.  Well I managed to stress myself out so much I was having trouble sleeping by day 14.   Writing a book is something I want to do and not hate doing, so I decided to focus on writing everyday and not counting the words.  I had to take a break from obsessing over winning the month, and rebalance.  In the end, I finished November with over 30,000 words.

If you ask me, I think this was a great first year effort and I'm feeling good about my Cozy Mystery book in process:  Temporary Name: Creating Cakes, Book 1, (I'm looking for a punny title but have come up short so far)  Creaking Cakes, Book 1 is about 25 percent finished and I'm excited with where I am going,  as I recently introduced my main character "Jane" to her future love interest "Mr. Northmen"  He  looks like this...

(picture from pindaddy.com )


He is an 8th Grade teacher. Yes, picture Keanu Reeves as a middle school teacher.  Jane just ran into him while volunteering at the school this past Friday.  I could go on, but I should focus on actually writing the book not writing about writing the book.

For Thanksgiving I tried a new turkey cooking recipe and that bird turned out delicious!   The high heat locked in the juices. After it was done, I lowered the temperature and cooked the sides.  Anna made the mashed potatoes with a recipe from Williams-Sonoma.

If you are going to make a turkey for Christmas,  you have got to try this recipe!  So easy and it works! The Simplest Roast Turkey, is a recipe by famed chef Thomas Keller which I found on the Epicurious website. Give it a try and you can feel that you are in the rarified air of professional chefs when you serve this roast turkey to your family!

Happy December!  Happy Advent !  Has this been a long year or what? 

Thanks for reading today and I'll blog again much sooner. 

xoxo