I know it’s Friday and the writing advice is supposed to be saved for Tuesdays, but Camp NaNoWriMo starts on July 1st, and it’s an awesome opportunity to get productivity on your writing project that only comes around a few months out of the year!
You may have heard of NaNoWriMo before: it’s a 30-day writing challenge, held annually in November, wherein participants must accomplish 50,000 or more new words of their novel between November 1 and November 30. The website has all kinds of resources, and you get pep talks emailed to you regularly to help you battle the urge to give up. It’s an awesome way to get a lot of words down if you’re still working on a first draft.
Camp NaNoWriMo is similar in that you have a word count or page count goal to accomplish, but this event is held in the months of April and again in July, and instead of having to push (or settle), for 50,000 words, the participants may choose their own goal. I know that for many, 50k is too daunting a task.
I wrote just over 50k in November 2017, winning the challenge. In April, I set my goal to 50k again and struggled to accomplish half of that. This July, I’ve decided to set my goal at 35,000 words. I find this goal to be both realistically achievable (after all, I just did 50k in November), and therefore less stressful, while also remaining a high goal that will add a lot of words to my novel. If I can get myself into gear, I may even make it to 50k anyway! Or maybe I’ll get to 12k and call it a day. The fact remains that, whether I blew my goal out of the water or fell short of it—it’s more words than I had before. It’s not about winning; it’s about achieving, and I urge you to participate if you’re working on any sort of writing project.
July 1st is this Sunday! Time is running short, but it’s never too late to start. You can always adjust your goal to prorate the time you’ve missed in the beginning (or expect to be unavailable for at the end).
THE TIME IS NOW. Let’s write together! If you’re participating in Camp NaNoWriMo, share your username with me, and we can be NaNo friends!