Happy Friday everyone! November was a pretty exciting month — I did not "win" National Novel Writing Month (I never do), but I did beat my previous record. I wrote 36,531 words and didn't burn out until the 23rd, which is honestly pretty good. Hopefully I'll get a chance to post a reflection over on [my website](https://eleanorkonik.com/) sometime this month, but honestly December is shaping up to be pretty intense. Tomorrow is my birthday, then we're taking my son on his first vacation, then I'll be attending Worldcon in Washington D.C. (if you're planning to be there, shoot me an email), then it's Christmas. My publication schedule shouldn't change much, but I'm definitely scrambling. I picked up Against the Grain by James C. Scott from the library and have slowly been making my way through it, along with the Dawn of Everything by David Graeber & David Wengrow. Both offer really interesting perspective about the history of humanity and our relationship with civilization. I also read a bunch of great articles and took a ton of notes on topics like locusts, botulism, and sea monsters. Now seems as good a time as any to mention that I have a [tip jar](https://ko-fi.com/eleanorkonik), for folks who would like to help me save up for publication costs like copyeditors and covers. I wound up with a bunch of stories from National Novel Writing Month that are too long for this newsletter, but that I would like to share with y'all, and doing it well can get expensive. In the meantime, did you know that premium subscribers not only get access to weekly short fiction, _and_ prose analysis — they _also_ get access to the backup drive for my [personal notes](https://publish.obsidian.md/eleanorkonik/). It's how I share the plain text files I use to organize all my notes and lets you trace the connections between these newsletters and how I use them. But in addition to spoilers, you can also load up a graph of all the interconnections between the stories I've published (and some that are still in progress 👀) — for example: