Well almost. I have had cataracts removed from both my eyes and brand new whizz bang plastic intraocular lens inserted. It's early days yet and the initial results of the first one were less than stellar but now things are settling down a bit and I'm hoping to be able to see more than a blur soon. So far my vision is not as good as I would like but that was always a possibility and as I said it's early days. I'm assured that new glasses - which I can't get tested for for another six weeks - should deal with this so all in all I'm pretty happy as far as that's going.
What I'm not so happy about is the time lag between the operations and getting the new glasses which will in total from the first operation will add up to around sixteen weeks. That's quite a long time because blurry vision is very disabling and my independence has been very much compromised. Right now I am only able to type this because I can increase the font size to scary levels and that lets me read. It's still blurry but the magnification enables me to pick out what I've type - and since the computer obligingly underlines spelling errors in red I can take up my trusty magnifying glass (I have five of them scattered around the house and another in my handbag) and correct them. It does make for a rather lengthy process, though, and as my eyes tire the blur increases until everything is illegible so this post will be fairly short.
In spite of this I did manage to do some writing during NaNoWriMo. I've taken part in this several times now and I find it a good way to push me along in whatever I have going at the time. I've never aimed at actually writing a novel - mainly because speculative fiction novels are usually somewhere around 120,000 words in length and I'd find it impossible to achieve that in thirty days. Instead I aim at about 50,000-60,000 first draft words. This year that was obviously not going to happen so when a friend challenged me to simply try for however many words as I could manage in a day every day I accepted.
And - drum roll, please - my total was 15,691. That may not sound much but believe me it was very hard work to get that far. Even better than my word total is the way it has set my mind buzzing. The work in progress, which had stalled due to my health problems, is advancing again and that makes me one very happy writer.
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