Woo hoo! I just hit my Camp NaNoWriMo goal for the month, and with a whole day to spare.
Camp NaNoWriMo, which happens every year in April and July, is the more flexible version of NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, which happens in November. The November version is a challenge for writers to start a new novel and write 50,000 words in one month. Camp NaNo allows writers to work on projects that are not novels, to use the month to outline or write notes for a novel, or to set their own writing goal for the month, which can be a word count or an amount of time spent writing. I did start a new novel on April 1 and was aiming for a goal of 20,000 words this month.
My preliminary count for tonight is 20,048 words.
I started well, and was making great progress, hitting more than the 667 words a day necessary for making it to 20,000. Halfway through the month, I was ahead of schedule. Then I hit a snag with an unexpected attention drain (when my son’s roommate came down with covid and my husband and I had to drive down to campus to bring him home to quarantine here). That should not have kept me from writing as often as it did, especially since my son never came down with the virus. But I’d lost my focus, and struggled to get it back.
After four days in a row of not writing at all, I forced myself to jump back into it. Tonight I’d gotten to a good stopping point and exceeded my 667 words for the day, and was going to put it away and finish tomorrow. And then I counted my words and saw that I had less than a hundred to go to meet my target for the month. Another ten minutes, and I was there.
I was writing with pen and paper the last couple days, so tomorrow I’ll type it into the computer and verify the word count. And I am by no means finished. I still have plenty left to do to finish the novel. But tonight I feel like celebrating.
The Petrini Page 