I have been a little bit incognito from my blog lately because I was working on my novel for Camp NaNoWriMo and I finally completed it for the month of July! For those of you that don’t know about Camp NaNoWriMo it’s basically a virtual writing competition that goes on in the months of April and July. You join other writers in the competition as well and you join with other writers. What is extra cute about it is that you get to join a little virtual writing cabin and you just post/track your goal and discuss your writing with one another! This competition really keeps me focused, accountable, excited about writing, and I just love the community aspect of it!
If you read my last post, my goal was to achieve 10,000 words by July 31st! And I am happy to confirm that I almost achieved 10,000 words!
Ok, so I officially reached 10,000 words by 12:30 midnight on August 1st but by 11:59 I reached 9,677 words! 323 freaking words away!!! I was literally typing like a mad woman!
(Insert typing cat gif here)
Right around 11:20, I began to get a bit of writer’s block and originally promised myself that I would write the novel in sequential order but that didn’t happen when I was 40 minutes away from reaching my goal! And my hands were about to fall off around that time so I had to motivate myself somehow! So I decided to just write in scenes that I really wanted to write and was excited to get into. I am writing a magical realism/romance YA novel with a few kissy scenes that I wanted to write in so I delved into those lovie kissy scenes with wild abandon and just went for it!
Now, of course, I am nowhere near done with the novel! A typical novel is about 50,000 words and I am not sure what my goal word count will be but I am definitely shooting for 50,000 words for now! Just like any first draft of a novel, there is a lot of editing for me to do! Most of this novel is just cringy and I have so much work to do on it but I am so glad I achieved this goal and intend to go back to where I left off in my outlines. My goal is to work on this novel every day even if it is for ten minutes! That’s my advice to you guys! Nothing is perfect and timing definitely isn’t perfect! I always envision the perfect writing scenario where I am your typical pretentious writer stereotype somewhere in Starbucks but that is just not the way adulting works, unfortunately! If you can spare ten minutes to work on your novel instead of scrolling through Instagram stories then your making progress! My goal is to complete the full first draft of the novel by the end of the year. I know that the NaNoWriMo challenge is going to help me achieve this challenge but ideally it would be amazing if I can actually get to the second draft of the novel before the end of the year! I am going to push myself as far as I can go with it but I refuse to beat myself up if I don’t get to that second draft! Life/adulting responsibilities will always get in the way and anything good takes time! I want to personally thank you guys for motivating me to push towards this goal and I will continue to update my novel progress!
Did you participate in Camp NaNoWriMo?! How did you do? Did you reach your goal? Let me know in the comments below!