On November 1, I more-or-less shuttered my online presence because I was diving into a work-for-hire project that I knew would dominate all of my free time. I was also under a non-disclosure agreement that prevented me from talking about said project in any but the most abstract terms. (Still am.)

Over the next 53 days, I wrote 87,000 words on it, making it the longest thing I have ever written by almost double its next-longest competitor, and almost three times longer than the longest thing I have ever published. During those same 53 days, I also wrote around 50,000 words of the various freelance work that I do most every month in varying quantities. So, suffice it to say, I haven’t been online much since the end of October, and I’ve been writing a lot. However, as of last Friday, I got to the end of the manuscript on that big, secret work-for-hire project.

Given that it was the day before Christmas Eve, and I hadn’t really had a day off in ages, I decided to take a couple off for the holiday. I didn’t really even get on my computer at all over the weekend, so today is pretty much my first time back, and even today I’m not doing a whole lot here. So if you’ve missed me around Facebook or Twitter or what-have-you, that’s why.

I’ve still got some freelance projects lined up to close out the month, and there’s still a lot more work to do to get even this really rough draft of the secret project manuscript ready to go out for the first round of revisions, but for now I’m just happy to have gotten through it at all, even if, as I predicted over on Facebook when I hit “then end,” all 87,000 words are terrible.

Regardless, it’ll be out of my hands again (for a little while) in about a week’s time, and then hopefully you’ll see me around a little more often. If nothing else, I’ll try to do at least a post or two recapping some high (and low) notes from this weird, surreal, often terrible but sometimes great year gone (mostly) by. Until then…