Nature / Writing

Well, with this round of  Camp Nanowrimo  heading into the final 17 hours I can safely say I will NOT be "winning" this time around, seeing as I would need to do 16 more hours of writing to meet my goal and I do have a job to go to shortly. I did, however, succeed in writing three new short plays this month, made great progress on two longer plays, and started two picture books. So it was still a pretty good run. I actually made the decision not to finish yesterday, and was leaning towards that decision on Saturday. As soon as I looked at all the things I wanted to do with the past weekend and realized it was either do those things and write for a few hours or forget having a weekend at all and just write, I chose the more balanced approach. When I was younger I surely would have surrendered my whole weekend to an online writing challenge, but as I stated in my project listing on the Camp Nanowrimo website: The real goal is not the final tally though; if I get far b...

Today marks the halfway point for this month's  Camp NaNoWriMo , the set-your-own-goal online writing challenge tied to National Novel Writing Month in November. Rather than choosing a word count goal, I wanted to use this month to build a regular, daily writing habit. My current tally is at 18 hours, which would have me more than halfway there if I'd gone with a simple hour-per-day goal. But I had a different plan, as explained on my Camp NaNoWriMo Project Page : The goal is at least one hour a day (30 hours), plus one additional hour on the days I know I'll have off during the month (+12), plus at least two mini-binge days with two additional hours (+4), for at least 46 hours spent writing in April.   So with that in mind, I technically should have been at 23 hours today to really be on track. But since my ultimate goal is to build up better habits, I went into this hoping that the month would get progressively better, not planning to have it all come together on d...

Come April, I'll be participating in Camp NaNoWriMo, a month-long writing challenge where you create your own definition of success. It's the more flexible cousin of November's National Novel Writing Month, where all participants are trying to write 50,000 words in those 30 days. I've twice "won" at NaNoWriMo (and once at the now defunct Script Frenzy challenge), but that was over a decade ago. For my first time at camp, my whole goal is based on writing hours rather than word count or even a particular project. I've never been someone who wrote everyday, but in the past few years my writing sessions have become more sporadic than ever. So I'm going to Camp with the goal of creating new habits which I hope will last long after the month is over. Want to set your own writing goal for April and have some online friends to cheer you on? There's still time to sign up for camp !

Sunday December 1, 2013 Just before the start of November I made a last minute decision to sign up for National Novel Writing Month, an annual challenge to write a minimum 50,000 word novel between November 1st and 30th. Unlike the 3-Day Novel Contest, you don't submit your work for judging and there are no prizes - NaNoWriMo is just about using an online community and a deadline to get yourself motivated to get a first draft down on the page. I've participated in and "won" NaNoWriMo twice before, but both of those books have been sitting around for years in need of major rewrites. I decided to sign up again this year when I looked at the rules and realized you're allowed to work on a revision of a previous work, as long as you start your prose from scratch. So I decided to use this November to completely rewrite one of those languishing NaNo books. I knew I'd be off to a late start, since I still needed to figure out my revised outline AND finish off som...