Tag: camp nanowrimo

March has arrived, bringing with it pleasant weather, Pi Day, and the countdown to Camp NaNoWriMo.

This year I have no idea which project to pursue. Over the past couple of years I’ve worked on Wikiwrimo updates and blog posts for this site during Camp NaNo. This year, I started working on Wikiwrimo updates earlier than usual (gasp, right?), and while my list of possible post ideas is growing, I still haven’t posted all of last year’s posts yet. Oops.

So what now? So far my main idea is reworking the novel I rewrote for 2016’s NaNo. I have two separate first drafts, with the second version containing some major changes from the first version. The question here is what to do with this. Do I create an outline for the third draft? Do I create that outline now and then write the actual third draft? I’m leaning toward the former despite my inclination toward pantsing, simply because I can’t just keep cranking out new drafts forever. Eventually I need to sit down with what I’ve written and figure out what works, what doesn’t, and how to make the prose shine (because I assure you the prose does not shine at the moment). Next month can be that time.

I can’t back out now, though–I’ve already joined a cabin for this session of Camp. Last year I joined cabins with a mix of people I already knew and people I didn’t; while this was a fun experience, it also meant that I would chat with the people I knew elsewhere. My original cabin plan for this Camp NaNoWriMo session was to enter an randomly assigned cabin; however, that changed when someone from the NaNo forums invited me into their cabin unprompted. Why not? I thought and clicked Join. Randomness can wait for the July session.

What about you? Are you doing Camp NaNoWriMo this year?

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.

Camp NaNoWriMo is halfway over.

While I’m making solid progress on writing a bunch of these blog posts that have sat in the pipeline for ages, I’m still terribly behind my 30,000 word goal for the month. Despite my progress and long list of blog posts, I’m not sure I have enough material to last another 20,000 words.

Writing these blog posts has also taken up a lot of time. I know the NaNoWriMo philosophy is to write now, edit later. I’ve been doing that for a lot of these posts in progress, often writing random sentences as some semblance of an outline and then later figuring out how to string them all together into something coherent. That’s how a lot of these posts are getting written: I write out whatever I can get out of my head, occasionally stopping mid-sentence, to get an idea of what I want to say in a given post.

As a result, I’m frequently writing three or four posts at a time, piecing the elements of each of these posts together and trying to figure out what exactly I want to say in a certain post. A day or two later, I come back to these posts, fill in the blanks, and then polish up the post and declare it finished. That’s what I did yesterday; I started one post (which I finished today) and filled in the blanks to finish four different posts that I had been tapping away at for several days.

The problem is that I’m just past 10,000 words and am starting to run out of material to write in a timely fashion. My brain isn’t churning out the ideas like it has in past years. Sure, I could count some of my other writing toward the 30,000 word goal, but to be honest, this already feels like substantial progress. I’ve finished enough blog posts to post content for at least several months, perhaps through the end of the year if I come up with a few more ideas.

There’s also the time factor. A 30,000 word goal means writing roughly a thousand words a day every day for a month. Even on good days, it still takes me at least an hour to reach that thousand words, sometimes two hours if I’m writing multiple posts or struggling to get my thoughts organized. This makes me feel unproductive, which brings my mood down, which affects other areas of my life. (Yes, I know I spend that much time–and more!–writing fiction in November, but that feels different because I find myself getting more done in those hours.)

I’ve officially lowered my goal from 30,000 words to 20,000 words. At first this sounded like cheating to me, but the point of Camp NaNoWriMo is to set an achievable goal and reach that. And for me, that goal isn’t 30,000 words of blogging–at least, not if I’m putting my mood on the line. So 20k it is.

What about you? How is your Camp NaNoWriMo going?