April was a Camp NaNoWriMo month, and for me, it was a successful one. NaNoWriMo is, of course National Novel Writing Month. The idea is to write the first draft of a 50,000-word novel — or 50,000 words of a longer novel — in one month. That comes out to 1,667 words a day.
Regular NaNo is held in November. Twice a year, there is Camp NaNo, a more informal, flexible version. You can choose your own goal; you don’t have to aim for 50,000 words. And you can work on a project you’ve already started; you can outline a novel instead of writing one; you can choose a poetry, short-story, essay, blog, or script project; or you can edit a manuscript you’ve already written.
This time, I was editing a manuscript I finished during November NaNo. I’ve been editing for several months, but for April, I completed the first round of editing and started on the second round. I could not come up with a reasonable way of tracking my progress, so in the end I used the word count for each chapter as I finished it. And using that figure, I hit 50,000 words by April 21, and ended the month with a total of 76,294 words in the chapters edited during NaNo.
Of course, I am not finished with the manuscript. So my work here is not yet done.
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