Confession: I’m writing most of this post in July so it can count toward my Camp NaNo total.
Now that July is over, let’s look back at the month.
I wrote a total of 20,389 words in July out of a 20,000 word goal, which means I won both Camps this year. Hooray!
July saw me working on a total of 28 blog posts. This includes my monthly(ish) book review post as well as a few posts that have been published throughout the month. July also saw me lowering my goal from 30,000 words of blogging to 20,000 words mid-month. While it felt like the easy way out at first, now I’m glad I did it. Aiming for 30,000 words was stressful enough when I was trying to make those words suck less than usual, and it was easily eating up most of my evenings during the week. Lowering my goal let me concentrate on other things on top of blogging, giving me a chance to work more regular writing into my busy lifestyle.
I wrote a lot of the blog posts on my list of things to write, whether in my ginormous Google doc or already existing as drafts within this site. This is great! I’ve written a lot of the ideas that have made their way to that list, as well as some posts that weren’t on the list at the beginning of the month. The saying is true: writing brings forth more ideas. Even though there were several days of the month where I’d stare at the “Add New Post” screen for ten minutes, there were also days where a new post would magically show up in my mind and not leave until I scribbled it down in its entirety. Some days I’d spend three hours writing my daily quota; other days, the quota would show up on my screen in under an hour–nowhere near my fiction first draft writing pace. That’s okay. What really matters is getting the words down, no matter how long it takes.
Taking on this blogging project for July Camp NaNo has also forced me to look at that list of posts and eliminate the ones I’ll never write, for one reason or another. This has been an experience in itself, as some of those ideas are over five years old and have therefore lost all relevance. Case in point: one of my old blog ideas was about what I could buy with $1500 instead of Google Glass. Remember Google Glass? I went to one of their demos in 2014, and it was a good time. But much like Google Wave and Google Buzz, Glass just didn’t take off. No one would care about that post now unless I were a time travel blogger of some kind.
So, to answer the real question: when will you see these posts? Most of these posts are as edited as I can get them in one go. My current plan is to reread the posts for typos and making sure I don’t stop in the middle of a sentence anywhere, and then post them at about a rate of once a week (or about the rate I try to blog at now). If you didn’t know I was writing all these posts in one month, you’d probably have no idea I wasn’t just writing them a few hours before posting in the first place. But thanks to camp, there are enough posts in my buffer to last quite awhile.
You’ll get to read me talking about feelings and life and anxiety and spoilers and books and social issues and who knows what else. I’ll be getting down and dirty and personal and confessing things that haven’t found their way online yet (and sometimes not even on paper). There will be essays of an impersonal nature and about writing and the occasional whining over why I’m not accomplished yet, dangit.
But somewhere in all those posts, there’s a glimmer of hope–that maybe not everything is terrible after all.
I hope you’ll stay along for the ride.