friend – Jen's Pen Den

Congrats, everyone. We made it to Friday! Let’s take a moment to do a happy dance, shall we?

Wriggle, wriggle, wriggle. Shake, shake, shake. Boop, bop, bee-boop!

…Okay, okay. I’ll stop torturing you with my “dancing”, lol.

Because I know so many of you are super busy and hard at work with NaNoWriMo, I’m going to keep today’s Friday Funny post on the shorter side…er, hopefully.

My week went well. Just busy-busy, as usual, and filled with lots and lots of writing. I suppose I had two big highlights:

First, I got to spend some quality time with one of my besties. We rarely get to do this since we both have such hectic lives, but we finally planned ahead of schedule and met up. And it was awesome! Sometimes, you just need to push pause on the chaos, stress, and go-go-go of life and hang out with one of your best friends.

What made it all the better was my friend surprised me with a thank you gift in the best form possible: BOOKS!

unnamed Yes, my friend knows me all too well. And she knows one of my favorite YA series is Daughter of Smoke and Bone. And she knows I’ve been dying to own all three books. Now I do. Thank you, Kelsey!

The second big highlight of the week was finding out the results of the second round of the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Challenge. Don’t ask me how, but my political satire, Operation Disney, placed 8th out of 40+ writers.

Yeah, when I saw my respectable score, I laughed out loud. I was so shocked! I’d expected to see a big fat zero next to my name. To see anything more than that was…well, laughable. However, as my shock has worn off, I have felt more and more proud by the results. I guess this proves you should never give up and you should always try. Even if you think, “Political satire? What the heck is political satire? How do I–What do I–What?” Don’t throw in the towel. Just go for it!

Unfortunately, I didn’t collect enough points from round one and two to advance in the competition, but that’s okay. To be honest, I said a prayer the night round 2 scores were released: “Dear God, please give me enough points to salvage my pride, but not enough to advance.”

Yes, I know, pride is a sin and I shouldn’t ask God for it. And asking for failure is kinda lame, but I did and He listened, so there! 😉 But, seriously. As competitive as I am, and as cool as it would’ve been to move on in the competition, I just couldn’t. I don’t have time! I’m mere chapters away from finishing the second draft of my novel, and once it’s finished (hopefully today or tomorrow), it’s onto editing a third draft. My goal remains to have that draft done and ready for initial presentation by January 1st.

Me too, Tim. Me. Too.

Fingers crossed I’m able to buckle down and “make it work”. 😉

Okay, okay. I promised I’d keep this short today, so time to wrap this bad boy up! In honor of my not so horrible Disney inspired political satire, as well as finishing up the second draft of my manuscript, here are today’s Friday Funnies. Enjoy!

401d48768df82ba2607895f0492bd33c IMG_20141104_205640 73babec84847242f0322cf202a13c565 How was your week? How’s NaNoWriMo going for those of you participating? Are you staying on track? Getting ahead?…Falling behind (ahh!)? Just remember: it’s still early in the month. Even if you’ve fallen behind, you have plenty of time to catch up. I was behind by 10K around this time last year, and I managed to get my stuff together and knock it out. And you can too!